The 8 millionth call came through via phone late on Monday afternoon last week.

Bupa proudly supports the invaluable work of Kids Helpline and its counsellors, who provide care and understanding to young Australians when they need it most.

“Since the launch of the service in 1991 a young person has attempted to contact Kids Helpline every 56 seconds and on average we manage to deal with around 800 calls or online requests for help every day,” said yourtown/Kids Helpline CEO Tracy Adams.

“We want to take a moment to recognise our dedicated counsellors and the teams behind the call centre, as well as the community, who fund more than three-quarters of our service by buying tickets in the yourtown Art Union prize draws,” said Ms Adams.

“While the 8 million figure is an important milestone for us, we know our work isn’t done. While we do our very best with the resources we have, more than 186,000 calls and requests for help have already gone unanswered this year alone.”

For 21-year-old Molly, the Kids Helpline service has been vital for her very survival, having called the counsellors numerous times when suffering serious mental health issues.

"There are times I know I wouldn’t have made it through to the next morning if I hadn’t been able to call Kids Helpline. The counsellors have helped me calm down and are able to get me thinking reasonably again. There’s no way I would be here today if it wasn’t for the service,” explains Molly.

Molly’s mother Sue agrees: “I will always be eternally grateful to Kids Helpline. Without them I doubt we would still have our beautiful daughter.”

The top five reasons young people contacted Kids Helpline in 2017 were: mental health issues, family relationships, emotional wellbeing, suicidal thoughts and dating/partner relationships.

Bupa partners with Kids Helpline to provide the Kids Helpline @ School (KAS) Wellbeing program. The free program is delivered in primary schools around Australia by professional Kids Helpline counsellors, connecting the counsellor to the classroom using video technology, and covers a range of topics including bullying, anxiety, building resilience and promoting help seeking behaviours.

Jane Power, Chief Marketing and Customer Officer at Bupa A&NZ is pleased that Bupa are supporting the @ School Wellbeing program.

“Most importantly, it connects children to the Kids helpline service, so that they know no matter the problem or where they are based, there is someone there to listen and guide them,” says Ms Power.

The partnership is well on its way to achieving its target of rolling its in-school education program to 10,000 children this year. Register for the free school program.

Read the Kids Helpline press release in full.

UP NEXT:

Kids Helpline and Bupa to take on mental health and bullying in schools program

Bupa Australia and Kids Helpline inspire resilience through schools program

Mental health. Wellbeing. Connection.

We know that many of our customers are relying on us to find ways to help reduce the cost and improve the quality of healthcare across the country. It’s an innovation challenge that we accept and it drives us every day.

Customers are quite clear. They expect us to be working with GPs and specialists to ensure transparency of information to enable patients to make more informed decisions about their insurances treatment and methods of prevention.

And while we know that the benefits for the community rest in strengthening innovation between health companies such as Bupa, government, care providers and patients, we need to do everything we can to foster our own culture of innovation.

At the heart of that is our purpose of helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives. It’s what motivates our 20,000 people and is inspiring them to develop new ways to care for our customers.

It’s what led to innovation examples such as our Person First approach to Aged Care and our soon to open Bupa Therapy centre that’s using human centred design to meet customers’ needs in disability care. It’s been achieved through people moving from a “wish we could” mindset to one that asks, “so how do I get it done?”

As a Bupa leadership team, we’re constantly asking ourselves: “how are we giving our people time to think and the power to act?” Can we channel the approach of companies like Netflix who have been nimble enough to harness changing technologies to quickly adapt and meet consumer needs.

Are we trimming old, unnecessary processes to let our people do the best job possible and respond quickly to our customers’ needs and wants?

What we do know is that ingraining innovation into an organisation starts at the top through trust in our people, fostering collaboration, accountability, and also being prepared to fail.

Innovation can seem like a huge transformational undertaking for big organisations, but it needn’t be scary. It’s been said that it takes roughly six months for a culture to permeate a person’s way of working, but these collaborative behaviours and mindsets are what leads to more innovative and efficient processes.

From our perspective, nurturing innovation in our business is key to building a better healthcare system and ultimately improving quality of life for all Australians.

Visit and connect with Jane on Linkedin here

Read more from people working at Bupa

Ms Power is currently Director of Brand and Health & Care Marketing for Bupa A&NZ, where she has guided the company's brand strategy and helped reposition the company from an insurer to a broad health and care company. She has also been Bupa's key global brand lead, helping all of its markets expand their brand presence, a role she will continue when assuming her new responsibilities on the Bupa A&NZ executive team.

She succeeds John Moore who is moving to Bupa's corporate centre in London to take up a new global customer service leadership role.

Ms Power joined the company in 2013 from Suncorp Group where she held roles including Executive Manager of Direct Life and Executive Manager of Wealth Management and Direct Risk. She also spent five years at MLC working across a range of roles including platform distribution. She was Head of Product and Marketing at Asteron, prior to the merger with Suncorp. She has an MBA from Queensland University of Technology.

Bupa People Director Naomi Attwood said: "Jane brings to the role a great depth of marketing and commercial experience at MLC, Suncorp and Asteron, prior to joining Bupa in 2013.

"More recently, Jane has passionately led our Brand strategy for the past two years, bringing the Bupa brand in our Australian and more recently New Zealand markets to life in a new way."

Commenting on her appointment Ms Power said: "I am incredibly honoured to be given this opportunity to lead a fantastic team that is doing such impactful work for our people and customers.

"As a marketing group we have worked very hard over the last few years to reposition Bupa as a broad health and care company. We know those efforts are making a real difference to the way our customers feel about the brand as a whole.

"For that reason our marketing activity will continue to focus on making that real difference in health and care, particularly delivering on the experiences that are important to our customers and people.

"Platforms such as Health Link are critical to this, helping us create greater engagement with consumers around health issues that matter to them.

"It's an exciting time at Bupa and I'm thrilled to be taking on the role," Ms Power said.

A new Director of Brand and Health & Care Marketing will be appointed in due course.