Community Living Australia: Tracking, tagging and tailoring against quality standards  

Background  

Community Living Australia came together in 2015 when CLASS and Community Lifestyles came together.

The merger has put Community Living Australia in a strong position to offer our values-based, holistic and personalised services to more people than ever before, helping them to live the life they want to live and to achieve their own personal goals.

Community Living Australia now supports close to 500 clients and employs over 500 staff across the state and they are committed to ensuring its clients and people with disability have valued roles in the community, the opportunity to accomplish their goals and the ability to realise their dreams.  

Challenges

Community Living Australia is a very dispersed organisation and the challenges that that brings is that it can be difficult to get really consistent communication to our staff and also our clients in real time.

Lack of consistent communication across the organisation‍

Another challenge has always been to ensure all staff are aware of and understand compliance standards and procedures that ever-changing within the healthcare and social care industry. The team at CLA struggled to keep up with frequent changes in regulations and standards from the ministry long-term care.

Keeping up with NDIS

‍With ever-evolving guidelines, it is difficult to ensure all standards are consistently met across all areas. As well as, preparing for frequent audits from the ministry can be resource-intensive and stressful. The need for ongoing monitoring to ensure compliance can lead to staff fatigue and complacency.

‍Data

‍One key challenge was establishing quality data practices. As well as, overcoming resistance to change and ensuring staff were adequately trained in data collection and analysis. Staff were prioritising immediate client needs over data entry, leading to incomplete or inaccurate records. Additionally, integrating various data sources and ensuring data consistency across systems can be complex, requiring robust infrastructure and ongoing support. These hurdles must be addressed to build a culture that values data-driven decision-making and improves care outcomes.

How we work together:

At Tendable, we are proud to work with and support Community Living Australia (CLA) – a registered disability provider across regional and metropolitan South Australia. CLA provide a range of flexible services, personalised for children and adults living with disability.

Solution:

Tendable is fit for purpose and adaptable to the complex needs of Community Living Australia.

We can view multiple processes at any one time at multiple areas across the organisation. Allowing our front-line teams to be proactive and strategic.

The NDIS practice standards are a challenge. However, we can get through those practice standards and extract data from the touch of a button on Tendable. The tagging feature on Tendable allows our teams to tag each of our questions with a quality standard from the NDIS practice standards.

Our transition to Tendable has been seamless and we can communicate best practice across the organisation in an extremely efficient manner.

As a disability service provider, Data is key particularly in the NDIS environment, we need to know how we are performing as it affects people's lives. Compliance changes all the time. Tendable adapts with those recommendations, and that's what you need in any quality system.

The team at CLA provide their clients with life changing care every day across a range of settings, including through supported accommodation and individual or group support sessions. CLA and Tendable work closely to ensure CLA continue to offer world-leading care quality across these settings, meet NDIS practise standards, and evidence this to regulators.

By building a robust audit programme specific to CLA’s requirements, leaders are able to record, measure and evidence the quality and the support they provide. As a proud registered partner of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), CLA has the ability to audit against NDIS Practice Standards efficiently through tailor made audits and our unique tagging feature. By creating tags based on these standards, teams can track their compliance in real time through our industry-leading analytics dashboards.

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