Review of National Aged Care Quality Regulatory Processes - Public Submissions

- The 44 outcomes effectively cover what is happening within a service, BUT apart from the evidence on paper being compliant, more time needs to be spent ensuring that the reality ( physical evidence) matches the written word.

- The timing is ok . Every 3 years if accreditation is attained. Support visits are good.

- Accreditation staff are generally friendly and non- threatening.

- Currently, each service is given usually up to several months, notice of the impending visits. This is time enough for services to ensure that they are meeting the outcomes, which in itself is ok. However, a much more accurate picture would be obtained if the visits were done say, with a weeks notification. This would enable services to organise staff and appointments etc, but not enough time to cover up ALL non - compliances, which would give a truer picture of how the organisation is travelling in terms of service delivery.

- Some organisational heads believe that the service's Manager should be able to shoulder the visit without support from Senior Management. My experience has shown me that this is simply an avoidance mechanism for those people to be accountable for organisational compliance, which at the end of the day, is so influential in how a service's Manager can achieve what needs to be achieved with the resources given to him/ her by the organisation. In my experience, CEO's do not like to discuss staffing levels, because they are pivotal to making a profit.

As a service Manager, thew complaints that I would want to make would be in regard to organisational heads being twice removed from the reality of what is required to provide even adequate care of residents.

A feel that a complaint of this nature would not be accepted as it is way too broad and to investigate such issues would require me as a Manager, to endanger my own employment. It would also open the flood gates to what is really going on in aged care, and the system just could not cope with the amount of true non-compliance it would find.

- Based on my own experience as a Manager, I feel that complaints are generally well investigated by the ACCC. They require extensive documentary evidence around every complaint and so are quite rigorous in how they are handled.

- Again, when a complaint is made and an investigation initiated, the service's Manager is generally the person responsible for responsible for carrying this out and producing the necessary documentation. This can be a hugely onerous task, requiring many hours to answer the complaint adequately. Some organisations are better than others in providing service Mangers with any practical support throughout this process and so the Manger is taken away from the very demanding work required to monitor on a daily basis, what is actually happening 'on the floor', and then ensuring that day to day compliance is being achieved. I think the ACCC needs to have increased awareness of this and not request superfluous, unnecessary reams of paper. It would be mcuh more workable if the ACCC investigator could visit the service and carry out their own investigative work instead of
blithely expecting the service Manager to carry yet another burden.

Over the many years now that the Agency has existed, I have frequently heard the comment ' they need to go look under the bed sheets of residents to see what is really going on'. There is a wide perception that the Agency staff are too focused on what is written as opposed to what really happens.

Also, I think there is often a perception that Agency staff have largely NEVER worked in a residential service themselves, so have limited ability to truly understand how a service is functioning. There are a 'thousand and one' little details that underpin how a service runs that is simply not reflected in the process.