Catholic Healthcare remains committed to ensuring excellent care standards for our residents, clients, and employees. Through membership in our advisory bodies, the Quality Care Advisory Body (QCAB) and Consumer Advisory Body (CAB), which will open soon, residents, clients, and employees can have an important say in their care to help us improve care outcomes. Recommendations from feedback sessions held earlier this year have been approved by the Board and are outlined below.
Quality Care Advisory Body (QCAB)
At Catholic Healthcare, the Quality Care Advisory Body (QCAB) is committed to enhancing care in our Home and Community Services (HCS) and Residential Aged Care (RAC). Including consumer representatives in our membership ensures that the voices of our employees, residents, and their families are central to our efforts to exceed care standards. The QCAB is a collaborative forum that brings diverse perspectives from employees and consumer representatives to improve the quality of our services through open communication and teamwork.
The QCAB is vital in advancing care across Catholic Healthcare’s Home and Community Services and Residential Aged Care sectors. By creating focused groups for each sector, QCAB ensures that tailored solutions meet the unique needs of our clients and residents. Collaboration within QCAB generates valuable insights, empowering us to improve care and service delivery continually.
Several of QCAB’s key recommendations have been approved by the Board, leading to positive developments in both HCS and RAC. These initiatives include enhanced communication with clients and families in the community, including a new client management system, AlayaCare, to be implemented by early 2025. The introduction of a new Incident Management and Complaints Handling system for HCS and RAC, including a relationship-centred care model that focuses on personal connections between employees and residents, will enhance both care quality and satisfaction.
For clients, we have introduced enhancements to the Catholic Healthcare App for greater visibility and control over care plans and financial information, an SMS Communication System to provide updates about services and appointments, a Pain Management Assessment Review which led to updated pain assessment tools and referral process, and the distribution of Fee Information to enhance transparency on fee policies.
For residents, we have an In-room Booklet Review template that is being developed to provide essential information to residents and families, a Roles and Responsibilities fact sheet, an Incident Management Process Improvement to simplify the reporting process and streamline incident management and finally, a Medication Management Review to enhance safety and communication around medication management.
These updates demonstrate our commitment to delivering exceptional care across HCS and RAC. QCAB continues to play a crucial role in driving these improvements, and we look forward to sharing further progress.
Consumer Advisory Body (CAB)
In February this year, Catholic Healthcare’s Consumer Advisory Body (CAB) members came together online to provide feedback on personal care requirements and experiences to improve our service delivery and care outcomes for our residents and clients.
We delved into the crucial topic of quality of care, beginning with definitions provided by the World Health Organisation and the Australian Government. We collectively identified key attributes that define high-quality care: it should be effective, person-centred, accessible, and transparent, and illustrated these with both positive and negative real-life examples.
Complaint management, employee consistency, and mental health support were identified as areas for improvement in residential aged care.
With these changes in mind, we have introduced an incident register that is currently being enhanced to ensure that incidents and complaints are brought to the attention of people who can resolve them as soon as possible.
Our new rostering system has allowed our clinical employees flexibility in choosing their shifts, thereby reducing the use of outside agency staff. Pleasingly, employee satisfaction and retention are increasing concurrently across all our homes.
The Mood Mentors initiative, dedicated to enhancing positive mental health outcomes, has been successfully introduced at McQuoin Park and will soon extend to the St Hedwig community. This initiative trains non-clinical employees to recognise symptoms of anxiety and depression and provide support accordingly.
For our clients, we are pleased to share that our key focus for this year is to change our ways of working to ensure our processes align with what you expect from Catholic Healthcare.
Earlier this year, we introduced the Catholic Healthcare App to make information easier to access. This includes helping you keep track of service schedules and advising us of any changes you might have. Over the next year, we will give you access to your care plan and statements and make it easier to book services using the App.
While the App is a great option, we know some people prefer to contact us by telephone. That is why we also plan to review how we manage our customer service teams to improve call wait times and ensure a timelier resolution of your queries.
We acknowledge that recruitment and maintaining consistency in service schedules can be challenging. We are continually working on ways to employ more Catholic Healthcare community workers while improving our recruitment planning.
If you are interested in joining the Quality Care Advisory Body (QCAB) or the Consumer Advisory Body and sharing your thoughts on your care with Catholic Healthcare’s leadership, please look out for more information on becoming a member later in the year.