Meeting quality standards for care is absolutely the very least that’s expected of Australia’s aged care providers. And rightly so.

As an aged care provider, trying to achieve a compliance focus in your workplace while retaining your customer’s needs at the core of your business can be challenging, but it’s by no means impossible.

Connecting the compliance chasm in your workplace

Government regulations and standards are put in place to protect and maintain the safety, well-being and quality of life for people using aged care services. Put simply, compliance is the action you take, as an aged care provider, to ensure these standards are upheld.

To uphold your end of the bargain, you need these three things:

• Data-driven systems to help recruit the right people, regularly monitor your compliance data and stay on top of your requirements.

• Operational processes in place to ensure accurate reporting and the maintenance of quality care.

• Right people in the right roles applying those practices in their day-to-day functions.

Systems, processes and people are the key. Without these three things working in synergy, your workplace compliance is likely to suffer and in turn, your quality of care.

At the end of the day, the provision of quality, personalized care is delivered by an organization’s people but without the right systems and processes place to attract, train and retain the right people, the chasm between compliance and quality is likely to become larger at the risk of those who are most vulnerable, which are the people using aged care.

Where to start? It’s easy if you have the right tools in place. There are simple solutions available to meet your needs and to keep compliancy current in your workplace.

Powering compliance in your workplace

Let’s take a deeper dive into the three items at the core of a compliant workplace and look at a PowerHouse Hub platform that can help you manage the process better, from the ground up:

• Systems for complete compliance

You need to look at compliance as a foundation deliverable for your workplace from a holistic perspective. Ultimately, compliance needs to start at the staff sourcing phase and continue through the recruitment, selection and onboarding phases.

Power up your compliance machine with a data-driven PowerHouse Hub solution for your aged care organization which stores, maintains and monitors compliance data in real time, ensuring you stay on top of your workforce compliance, policies and reporting.

For providers that have working policies in place but need a straightforward system to capture, interpret and manage their data and reporting, this is the remedy for you.

• Processes for proven compliance

Ad-hoc compliance processes in aged care will not work. There are hundreds of compliance requirements which need to be met and as such, structure is needed to be able to achieve a successfully compliant environment in aged care.

PowerHouse Hub’s data-driven platforms helps you keep track of the requirements you’ve met as an organization, including your individual staff member’s compliance scores.

By creating a Job Readiness Shield for each job role in your organization based on a matrix of essential job skills and mandatory compliance and credential records. PowerHouse Hub’s Workforce Profile can continually monitor compliance and skills data, presenting the shield with an up-to-date score which reflects the current status of the employee. This real-time data is extremely useful for duty managers in charge of processes such as rostering, as they can see the compliance status of an employee or contractor before adding them to the roster. This ensures you have a comprehensively compliant staff rostered on at all times, delivering the highest standards of quality care to your customers.

This platform’s data analytics provides compliance scores over a time period and compliance scores in talent pools relating to specific information like vaccinations, allowing senior managers to assess the compliance viability of their organization on a regular basis.

• People for precise compliance

Ultimately, it’s your staff who need to implement compliance processes as part of their day-to-day operations without too much of a shift from their core duties – which is actually caring for people – so making sure they’re armed with the right information and support necessary to execute this is imperative.

By generating a Workforce Profile for each candidate in any of your talent pools, you’re essentially creating a real-time database of all the candidate’s qualifications, police and visa checks, compliance and credential licenses and certificates. The candidate has access to this profile and can decide what data is shared with the employer/recruiter. Likewise, their data can be viewed in real time by the hiring manager to help with the shortlisting and selection process.

Created automatically when someone applies for a job, the PowerHouse Hub Workforce Profile continues to collect and store compliance data throughout all phases of employment including the sourcing, pre-screening, selection, onboarding and upskilling stages. Managers are alerted automatically when workers are or have become non-compliant with remedial workflows and appropriate measures are then put in place for workers to be able to update their profile accordingly. A simple, streamlined process for all involved.

Compliance solutions for quality outcomes

With workforce shortages presenting a significant challenge for Australia’s aged care industry, it’s imperative to make sure that the staff you do have are well supported and armed with the right tools, not just to maintain the level of compliance required for the upkeep of the Aged Care Quality Standards, but to exceed its expectations.

Good enough is no longer an option, so aged care providers really cannot afford to take a laissez-faire approach to recruiting the right people as well as managing, monitoring and maintaining compliance and balancing customer needs in this very transparent environment.

So, streamline your hiring processes to job match the right people with the role right from the beginning and finally, commit to improvements in your workflow from the top down. As leaders in aged care, it’s the responsibility of the board and management team to set the tone as your staff adapt to any changes in your workflow.

Now is the time to set the new standard in aged care.

Need help?

Compliance is definitely not a ‘set and forget’, so reach out for help if and when you need it.

Book a no obligation call to explore more of PowerHouse Hub’s compliance solutions, specifically designed for the aged care sector.