The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission’s recently published Sector Performance Report for the March 2024 quarter provides some key insights into a number of areas of focus for the sector, where targeted improvement will result in improved experiences of older people receiving aged care.
Overall, while 84% of residential aged care providers were found to be fully compliant with the current Aged Care Quality Standards, only 64% of home care providers were compliant with all eight of the Standards. The two lowest levels of compliance were for Standard 2 – Assessment and Planning and Standard 8 – Organisational Governance, and the Commission also signposted an increased focus on the food and nutrition component of Standard 3 – Personal Care and Clinical Care.
Whether your organisation is compliant or not, it’s helpful to stay up to date on areas of focus, and regularly review your processes to ensure that older people are receiving the best possible care from the services you provide.
Preparing to deliver care – Standard 2
Assessment and planning requirements make up a large proportion of non-compliance with the Quality Standards, across both home care and residential aged care services.
Compliance with Standard 2 is a particular issue of concern in home care. Over one-third of home care providers were found to have compliance issues relating to Standard 2, particularly in the area of assessment and planning. Assessment and planning processes are especially important for home care providers, as the provider and staff have less control over the service environment, and may only provide services to, or even have contact with, each older person at limited times. Working with each older person and their family to put in place a care plan that works for them within their home environment is essential forhigh-quality home care.
Other issues of concern to the Commission across both residential and home care providers relate to risk management, especially failures to consider risks to safety and wellbeing when planning services, and failures to reassess and review risks when circumstances change or an incident occurs.
For those interested in risk management, we’ll be publishing a more in-depth look at how risk management can support your organisation’s processes soon.
Governance processes supporting compliance – Standard 8
Three of the ten lowest levels of compliance with the Quality Standards fall under Standard 8, which is concerned with organisational governance requirements. Compliance with Standard 8 is a continuing major focus area for the Commission, as organisation-wide governance systems, risk management systems, and clinical governance frameworks underpin the delivery of quality and safe care to older people.
Governance requirements do not exist in isolation. Careful consideration of governance requirements feeds into other important areas such as continuous quality improvement, demonstrating how reviewing and improving compliance in one area can lead to higher levels of compliance in many others. For example, low compliance with the safe and effective clinical care requirement could be linked back to an ineffective clinical governance framework that does not establish effective procedures for the delivery, review and improvement of clinical care.
The Commission’s provider governance reforms from December 2023 are designed to improve governance in aged care leading to greater levels of compliance with the Standard.
Food and nutrition in focus – Standard 3
The Commission’s Report also called out food and nutrition as a key area of continuing focus, in particular highlighting that high quality food, nutrition and dining can meaningfully improve older people’s quality of life.
Many of the complaints made to the Commission relate to the service of food and nutrition. In particular, residents of aged care facilities commonly raise concerns about the quality and variety of the food they receive, query whether their food meets their nutrition and hydration needs, or question the availability of food to suit specific dietary needs, including for medical reasons and religious or cultural requirements.
The impact of food and nutrition is so key to high quality care in aged care that it will be addressed with its own Standard in the forthcoming Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards. We’ve recently updated our food and nutrition resources to reflect changed requirements in the the proposed Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, as well as best practice.
Improvements in other areas with low compliance can in turn work to aid food and nutrition services. For example, improving planning systems that partner with older people to fulfil Standard 2(3)(c) could include co-design or feedback mechanisms to help older people have greater input into menu and mealtime planning.
Monitor your compliance with SPP!
It’s important for providers to regularly review their compliance with all eight of the Aged Care Quality Standards. Even if your organisation was compliant at its last audit, regular review of processes can ensure that day to day operations remain consistent with Quality Standards requirements. It’s also a very important part of the continuous improvement process.
We have a full package of modules in SPP to help providers with their Quality Standards compliance, as well as policy and process reviews. If you have a detailed grasp of all requirements, you might choose to use our Self-Assessment Tool module to prepare for audit. Or you might choose our more detailed Educative module to take your team through each itemised requirement of the Quality Standards. That module presents a series of questions for each requirement, drawn from the Commission’s examples of actions and evidence. We also have a range of Best Practice modules that focus on other key areas including Clinical Governance, Governance Reforms and Spiritual Care. All of our modules have integrated links to recommended SPP resources to help you put in place the right policies and procedures. And all of them allow you to generate gap analysis reports and improvement plans.
You can also search our Reading Room for other resources to help improve their processes, either by searching by topic or by standard. For example, searching for ‘planning’ brings up 44 resources that can assist with planning in our resource library, while searching for ‘ACQS2’ brings up all 34 resources that we’ve linked to Standard 2 of the Aged Care Quality Standards.
Have you reviewed your Quality Standards compliance recently?
Explore how SPP can work for your organisation’s ACQS compliance with a free trial.
