Our client: the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission is the new regulator for aged care, having brought together the functions of the old Aged Care Quality Agency and Aged Care Complaints Commissioner. It started operation on 1 January 2019.
What we did for the Commission
The Commission had seen our work with aged care consumers and the new aged care standards. It asked us to undertake two projects for them, developing workshops for aged care providers that would help them implement the new aged care standards:
The first project delivered a workshop for providers run by the Commission in cities around Australia commencing in February 2019, for up to 200 sector leaders and managers at each session
The second project required a tailored workshop for Darwin in May 2019, specifically for rural, remote and Indigenous service providers.
We built on our many years of experience in training, education and capacity building. We drew on our previous extensive consumer consultations about key aged care quality issues. We also drew on data from the Quality Agency and the Complaints Commissioner that helped predict key areas in which providers would need support under the new standards.
The Commission asked us to use a scenario-based approach. We responded by placing consumer experience at the centre of the workshops, just as it is at the centre of the new standards. The profiles of consumers featured in the materials were diverse. The workshops ask providers to reflect on factors influencing the quality of consumer experience, such as cultural safety, dignity of risk, restraint, and social isolation where consumers have no family involved in their day-to-day lives.
Our company designed, commissioned and oversaw production of video training resources, participant materials that included consumer storylines, and undertook a ‘train the trainer’ workshop for the facilitators who would run the workshops across the country.
The workshops proved so popular that they booked out, with the Commission scheduling dozens of additional sessions across capital cities and regional centres, many of which were similarly popular.