Aged Care Accreditation

It has been almost 2 years since the Aged Care Quality Standards (ACQS) were introduced. The Commission has stated that activity is going to quadruple from July 2021 with an additional 1,500 site visits expected, bringing it to 2,100 visits annually. This now means that every service or care home will have at least one unannounced visit per year or multiple visits for a single service. We know that to date 1 in 5 sites failed to meet some aspects of the standards and required remediation.

The Commission is also accessing and utilising more data sources (e.g. mandatory Quality Indicators, Serious Incident Reporting, Complaints and Feedback) to detect system wide risks and outliers, to inform the focus of site visits.

In addition to the increased level of assessment activity, organisations are preparing for uplift in the expectations of the standards (specifically governance and demonstrating a system of control).

Aged care accreditation

Watch this short video to see the Aged Care Accreditation Platform in action.

The current approach to accreditation is risk-based and proportionate, with an increasing focus on a provider's ability to respond to COVID-19, as we saw a high number of assessment contacts that focussed on infection control and management with many being conducted as short notice visits. A continued area of attention is on assessing front-line staffs’ awareness and ability to identify, respond and monitor outcomes of consumer risks in the residential care and home care environments and the governance of the organisation, including the level of maturity of their systems of control.

PwC’s Aged Care Accreditation Platform is a proprietary, web-enabled secure portal which assists you in quickly identifying, responding to and addressing gaps and risks in your processes against the Standards. The Platform enables tracking and monitoring at all levels of your business by focusing and supporting your teams on best practice procedures.

The Aged Care Accreditation Platform streamlines the accreditation preparation process for you by providing staff with real time access to information and resources to prepare and enable them to respond to an unannounced or short notice visit quickly and with confidence. In doing so, it creates the capacity to focus on building a robust system of controls that enables you, your staff, and your consumers to work together to be ‘every day accreditation-ready’ . This is going to be even more important with the expected increase in presence of the Commission, with more site visits and the introduction of the requirement for Board members to annually attest to their system of control.

Now more than ever, is the time to ensure you have systems in place that tell you, your staff and your consumers, how you are performing and driving continuous improvement.

Our Aged Care Accreditation Platform offers a number of benefits including:

Gives you and your board, your executive and your front line staff greater confidence that your facilities are ready for unannounced visits.

Interactive real time organisation-wide reporting enables you to identify gaps and target areas of focus across facilities and sites.

Definitions for each of the evidence artefacts to help you quickly identify the appropriate documents.

Supplementary and evidence gathering tools and templates to support you in your accreditation preparation and operational activities and reducing the burden of compliance.

Saves you valuable time and money by streamlining the processes and requiring documents to be uploaded once while automatically mapping to all applicable standards.

Did you know...

$2.5m

is the average cost of sanction

74%

of health care organisations spend more than 100k preparing for accreditation

There has been a substantial increase in serious risk decisions; related to Standards 3 and 8 and new powers to impose sanctions

COVID-19 + emerging themes from the ongoing Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety have highlighted the lack of evidence to meet the Quality Standards

Aged Care Accreditation Platform support

Our Aged Care Accreditation Platform:

is a readily available file repository, supporting you and your teams on the ground to confidently respond to announced and unannounced visits
streamlines your preparation process, by tracking and reporting on activity, allowing you to identify, leverage and share good practice across sites
provides greater visibility to your facility managers, your executive team and your Board on accreditation evidence gathering activity happening in your organisation through real-time dashboard reporting

We have also worked with a number of aged care providers to benchmark and identify key, supplementary and other evidence gathering templates and tools which may support you in your accreditation preparation. These are included in the Platform in a modifiable format for your use.

Using the value of your data to make better decisions

The data you have available through your current processes and software is invaluable. The Aged Care Accreditation Platform turns this into an asset that allows you to make more informed and timely decisions around quality and compliance.

The Aged Care Accreditation Platform is hosted in our PwC Australia AWS environment (physically located in Australia). PwC’s hosted Aged Care Accreditation Platform provides nominated staff with round-the-clock (24 hours/7 days) access to the data required during accreditation visits, and compliance monitoring from a whole-of-organisation to site-by-site basis.

By utilising PwC’s Aged Care Accreditation Platform, you save time and money that may otherwise have been spent on procuring the software, hardware, data management and technical resources required to set up and maintain the solution internally.