The Willochra Home is a Residential Aged Care facility providing a home-based environment for their residents, serving a wide rural area in South Australia. The Home initially sought a solution to meet accreditation, with changing requirements making it difficult to stay on top of obligations with previous processes and systems.
We spoke with their HR Officer, Stephanie Dunning and Admin Officer, Bonny Hill about their experience with CompliSpace, and how it has helped transform how they manage policies, education, and compliance within the Home and their ways of working.
“Because we’re a standalone facility, we only have a small admin team. The workload was increasing and we were finding it hard to keep up, even with the support of our clinical manager and our other manager.
There is a lot of reporting and documentation that we need to have, and to be paper based and searching for policies every year to keep up with the changes, we were falling behind. We have always met accreditation and didn’t want to fall behind this time, as we could see we were heading down that path. With the way we were, we just couldn’t keep up.”
Prior to CompliSpace, the Home was spending hundreds of hours, at an admin and Board level, updating, researching, and approving policies to meet the Standards. CompliSpace has cut down this time immensely, with policies now being approved within days, helping streamline the approval process for the Home's management and Board.
“We would spend hundreds of hours on policies, which would be sent off to the Board to read through and approve. Once it took 6 months to receive a policy back. Having CompliSpace I can send off the updates to the Resident Care Manager to read and approve, and then pass on to the Board, so they are aware of the policy updates. They don’t have to approve the policies anymore because it’s legislated.”
“CompliSpace has made things a lot easier, with everything located in one place online. Prior to CompliSpace, a lot of our forms were paper-based, and it was becoming difficult to keep track of everything required to meet the Standards. We are now able to keep up to date with our policies and procedures, forms, credentials, and education, and can easily print off records and transcripts to see how our staff are performing, especially through the Learning platform.
Staff now have a one-stop-shop to access policies and procedures, consumer and non-consumer incident forms, hazards and maintenance forms, feedback and complaints, and a range of other links including Learning.
Our education is now in one place, rather than our admin team researching various courses online to ensure we are up-to-date with the education requirements for Aged Care and the Standards. We create bespoke education or push out up-to-date courses to meet needs as they arise or needs recognised as an improvement though our CI program.
Our staff are more responsive to our training and education program as it is now all in the one place. We have a range of age groups at The Willochra Home, and everyone has been very willing to learn, and if they are unsure or are unable to login to their learning, then they ask for assistance from the admin team.
Staff also feel more confident to search for policies and procedures to ensure they are following them correctly. This has assisted with our incidents, as they read the relevant policy and follow the procedures.”
“Staff are engaging with our Feedback and CI program better, and feel their feedback is heard. We have implemented QR codes around the Home so they can easily find forms as needed.
Our incident forms are now directed straight to our management team, improving the time it takes to report, and our investigations are faster and more comprehensive. Investigation can be attended at a management level, and reporting for SIRS can be attended quickly and accurately.
Through reporting we are identifying areas and levels of compliance we had missed through new audits.
We have also improved accreditation reporting through our incident forms and registers for quality indicators, credentialing, self-assessments and clinical indicators.”
Implementing CompliSpace has helped the Home establish practices for long term compliance leading into the future.
“This is my forward planning for when I retire – I know the Home is going to be safe because we’ll be compliant and everyone at the Home won’t be stressed or overworked trying to keep up.”
Through CompliSpace, the Home has been able to not only stay on top of obligations and meet accreditation, but they have exceeded their requirements to stay on top of changes as they were released, going above and beyond to achieve great results for accreditation and their own processes.
We can prove what we’re doing, as well as improve. Every part of HR, reporting, auditing, and anything to do with paperwork we’ve improved on in leaps and bounds. We’re way ahead of the curve. And that’s how we got through accreditation, we kept showing them CompliSpace. We hadn’t even finished setting it up completely but were able to show them where we go and what we do – they were so impressed that we were able to meet every recommendation from the Aged Care Royal Commission before they were officially made to law. CompliSpace has helped!