REPORT FROM OUR CEO
REPORT FROM OUR CEO
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020 started quietly with confident anticipation of a year to be filled with progress and development - the second year of running our own call centre, offshore vessels in production locally, the new JetRIB innovation taking off, steady expansion of bases along the coast, a new organisational structure and the appointment of fresh new executives, growth and development of new stations, a massive training plan for volunteers and a huge effort in drowning prevention, with the addition of survival swimming. I was aware of COVID-19, it had been there before in my medical career, as had measles, chicken pox, influenza, SARS, MERS and HIV. Epidemics come and go, the virus runs through a community who develop herd immunity and the epidemic subsides. I expected three months at the most! What was impossible to anticipate was the multiple levels of lockdown, which brought economies and societies to a standstill and threatened businesses, livelihoods and lives across the world. We shut down all capital expenditure and reined in operational expenditure. In less than a week, we turned an onsite call centre into a virtual operation. We took our training online, fortunately having already invested in IT infrastructure and eLearning in prior years. We rapidly distributed all our stocks of PPE, designed appropriate response protocols, and set about procurement of further PPE stock. Day-to-day management was facilitated through focused virtual meetings.
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I can only compliment both staff and volunteers for their commitment and innovation in a crisis. If I reflect on how we were able to achieve this performance, I suppose it is because we are an emergency service, crisis is what we do! As with most other organisations, cash flow became a key issue. After an anxious initial few weeks, it was apparent that, despite reduced capacity in the call centre, our donors were backing us, and the flow of funds was able to not only sustain operations, but also capital projects. I wish to express my overwhelming gratitude to stakeholders and donors, who, despite the certain personal difficulty, backed us, stayed with us, and kept us afloat. Everyone was affected initially by shutdowns, including our service providers. We remained conscious of our contribution to both local and regional economies and expenditure was closely scrutinised to ensure that, while we maintained stringent conservatism, we did not unnecessarily stop procurement, and in that way compromise our operations and the livelihoods of our suppliers and supply chains. We fully expected a downturn in operations, fewer callouts, less demand, but the opposite happened. While beaches may have been locked down, COVID-19 generated considerably more work in the fishing and shipping sector. We did more medical evacuations from ships at sea in six months than we normally do in a year, but our volunteer stations rose to the challenge, despite the personal threat and risk, adapted quickly to infection protection protocols and carried on. Volunteers were not without fear, there was a concern, but with input
N S R I – I N T E G R AT E D A N N U A L R E P O R T 2 0 2 0
