When it comes to the self-assessment process for the new Aged Care Quality Standards, it’s a relatively consistent process to other compliance exercises.
- understand requirements
- formulate responses
- self-rate each requirement
- provide evidence and information to support the rating
Sure, there’s a lot of effort to collate the evidence and information but most organisations have it … somewhere. So, whether you’re using spreadsheets or Coverage to manage your self-assessment and audit responses, it’s just a matter of time and effort to get your assessment completed. But, and we might be a little biased here, Coverage does make it much easier 😊
So why is the Plan for Continuous Improvement causing headaches for providers?
At Umbrella Solutions, we spent a lot of time researching the new Standards reporting expectations and we understand why it’s difficult and also how to make it easier to manage.
As the name suggests, Plan for Continuous improvement (PCI) is meant to highlight the efforts and actions of providers to enhance the quality of their services. On the surface it seems quite aligned to the evidence required by the Standards.
However there’s a subtle difference; evidence is static, continuous improvements are alive.
If you have a resident service policy, you’re well on the way to meeting the Requirements of Standard 1. Grab the document. Attach it as evidence. Done.
But how do you show you’re improving your service offering? And better still; how do you track it?
You need some key pieces of information to track PCI activities
- What you’re improving
- Who’s responsible for it
- When is it due
- What’s the outcome
Some initiatives are large enough to be run as a project, so you can probably track that in a project management tool.
But what about the smaller operational tasks that your staff are working on like training, policy and procedure updates, preventative maintenance and process improvements? There may be 20, 30 or even hundreds of improvements aged care providers are making over a year.
The Government and assessors want to see all the things you’re working on now and since the last assessment. You need one place to see it together and to bring it to life.
We’ve got you covered
Coverage provides a unified location for all your responses to the Standards as well as Plans for Continuous improvement. With our prebuilt, live dashboard and reporting we give you visibility over your PCI activities
The Government has a separate PCI reporting template for providers to fill in. However, we believe you’re better off to keep all your responses and actions for the Standards in one place so you cut down on data entry.
In Coverage, PCI activities are recorded as Area for Improvement records against each Standard and Requirement. We also have a simple copy feature that allows you to duplicate an Area for Improvement to multiple Standards and Requirements in just a few clicks. You can even copy them across multiple residential or home care services!
To give you a full view of your activities, we have a live PCI dashboard and mini dashboards on the Overview pages.
We also have built in email notifications so staff receive an email when an Area for Improvement is assigned to them. They’ll also receive a reminder 2 days before the response is due and on the day that it’s due.
Oh, and let’s not forget you can export a PCI report anytime you want. And PCI activities are even included in the Self-Assessment and Audit reports.
We can get you up and running in Coverage with no technology support required.
So take control and bring your Plan for Continuous Improvement to life with Coverage.