If you missed our recent webinar on Standard 8 and Governance, Risk and Compliance for Residential Aged Care Boards and Managers, here's a guide to what was covered.
We’ve drawn on the language used in the Aged Care Quality Standards to define governance as:
“The policies, procedures and systems in place to assess, monitor and drive improvement in the quality and safety of the care and services the facility provides."
Good governance is a legal requirement: such requirements include board members’ legal obligations, Standard 8 of the Aged Care Quality Standards, and the common law duty of care.
Good governance keeps you on track: your organisation is on a path to maturity and improvement, or at least you want it to be. There will be challenges and obstacles. Good governance is a strong foundation designed to keep you from stumbling and falling off the path.
Good governance makes you better at what you do: in the case of aged care homes, good governance makes you better at delivering quality care to consumers.
To achieve good governance and meet your governance requirements you need a:
A compliance program is a system that helps you keep track of what requirements you have to meet, when you have to meet them, how you can meet them and how you can demonstrate that you’ve met them.
A good compliance program will cover:
Why do you need a whole program for compliance? Because there are hundreds of interrelated aged care compliance requirements and some of them change on an almost daily basis. Compliance in aged care is simply too complex to keep track of in an ad hoc way.
“Risk management is a structured process which assists organisations to predict future events which may impact on their activities, and allows them to take appropriate actions to address the likelihood of the event happening, and/or the impact of the event should it occur.”
Risk management is something that aged care workers do daily. Everything from cleaning up a spill to recording a dose of medication is risk management. But these activities are not necessarily Enterprise Risk Management (ERM).
ERM is a strategic approach to managing risks that looks at the whole of the organisation and is led by the board.
Risk management is a requirement in the Aged Care Quality Standards. Standard 8 Requirement (3)(d) says that an organisation must provide:
Effective risk management systems and practices, including but not limited to the following:
(i) managing high-impact or high-prevalence risks associated with the care of consumers
(ii) identifying and responding to abuse and neglect of consumers
(iii) supporting consumers to live the best life they can.
This represents the minimum in risk management that your facility must provide.
An effective risk management system is one that:
Finally, remember to pace yourself and get help when you need it. Governance is not something you can set and forget. It is an endless, dynamic process that requires ongoing maintenance.
Prior to Standard 8 in the Aged Care Quality Standards, there was no mention of Governance in the accreditation frameworks for Aged Care. And whilst the Royal Commission Aged Care commenced in October 2018, it wasn’t until mid-November 2019 that - for the first time - the focus of the Commission was Governance in aged care.
So, it’s no wonder that the Aged Care team at Ideagen CompliSpace are finding that many Residential Aged Care Board members and Managers do not fully understand governance, risk and compliance and the true responsibilities of their roles. Afterall, it’s not uncommon for board members to be volunteers or to be from backgrounds that are not specific to aged care.