In July 2019 new Aged Care Quality standards will come into effect, replacing the existing four. The fundamental change will be the shifting focus to consumer dictated care, moving away from a sole focus on internal organisation and process accountability. Obviously the accountability for good practices is still key, but the major change is engaging the consumer of the services and gathering feedback from them to improve the overall experience and care that you provide.
With the new standards come 8 new quality standards, that the governing agency AACQA is not being prescriptive with how you run your business but you will need to be able to demonstrate how you are approaching them, through a quality review. Thus providers are encouraged to create an action plan detailing the transition from old to new. The 8 new standards are:
- Consumer dignity and choice
- Ongoing assessment and planning with consumers
- Personal care and clinical care
- Services and supports for daily living
- Organisation’s service environment
- Feedback and complaints
- Human resources
- Organisational governance
Each of the Quality Standards is expressed in three ways:
- a statement of outcome for the consumer
- a statement of expectation for the organisation
- organisational requirements to demonstrate that the standard has been met.
With any change comes a plan, and it would be recommended to in all cases:
1) Make sure you have ownership in your organisation of the new standards and what they mean for you. Create an action group to read and understand the new standards and get this group to play back to the wider team.
2) Create awareness of the new standards across the business internally and externally. Get feedback from your employees, consumers and community to ascertain the true impact of them on you.
3) Complete a self assessment of your organisation and identify areas of improvements and gaps
4) Create an action plan to improve performance, new way of engagement, improved systems and processes and quality review procedures.
5) Put the plan into action and get ready to be reviewed against the new standards.
You can read everything you need to know on the new standards at https://www.agedcarequality.gov.au/providers/standards/quality-standards.
So how can HappyOrNot help you meet these new standards?
With the focus far more on consumer feedback, we believe at HappyOrNot we are well placed to provide you the tools and service to meet the new standards and capture consumer and employee feedback across your operations. We have a number of Aged care providers using our service already, setting the foundations for meeting the new standards.
Through our Smiley terminals you can measure different points of engagement with the consumer across your many touch-points from:
- Staff Engagement and feedback
- Dining room experience and quality
- Activities that you provide for your consumers
- Quality of overall service clinical care, to cleaning, to aged care services to support daily living, to staff attitude
- You can measure the engagement with the community from your consumers family and visitors to external consultants
But not only do we provide the consumer feedback gathering Terminals, but we provide the mechanism for you to report on them and through that reporting, measure and improve the services that you provide. The data that you will collect will help you demonstrate that you are focused on consumer care and support the quality review of how you are meeting the new standards.
Our Smiley Terminals are easy to set-up and we can get you up and running in under 12 days with no IT involvement, just think what you could be measuring now to help you evolve your action plan around supporting consumer dictated care.
Thank you for having a read and taking a look at our site!