Managing about 35 residential and community care services in a highly regulated industry means award-winning aged care provider Whiddon has a complex compliance and risk management regime.
Making sure risks among more than 2300 customers across NSW and Queensland are minimised is always front of mind, an important task made easier thanks to the support of Magentus compliance and risk management product eQstats.
The eQstats platform helps aged and community care providers better manage all aspects of their organisational risk, governance and compliance processes via a powerful end-to-end cloud solution.
All areas of risk and non-compliance are highlighted, enabling users to assign corrective and continuous improvement actions whilst linking all collected data to relevant standards.
Stacy Wake, General Manager Compliance and Risk at Whiddon, said eQstats has been helping Whiddon meet its compliance, auditing and incident reporting requirements for almost a decade.
Stacy explained that Magentus’s software provides Whiddon with a streamlined approach to incident reporting, flagging potential issues and delivering invaluable reports.
“We’ve got a direct interface between eQstats and our residential clinical system, so all events that occur with the residents are logged into the clinical system and they automatically transfer into eQstats.”
The Advanced Incident Reporting features provide users from all levels of the organisation with an intuitive, easy to follow incident reporting workflow. Incident data is transformed, categorised, benchmarked and risk rated, providing organisations with one source of truth and real-time reporting.
Incidents are managed, interpreted and assessed for further action within eQstats, Stacy explained, ensuring accountability, transparency and total governance.
“We can basically do our due diligence and governance of incident management in the one place. From an organisational perspective we can see right down to the level of the incident and the carer and the resident, so anything that happens can be seen by everyone who needs to be aware of it. Everyone can see everything that’s happening, all the way up to the CEO level.
“We also do all of our auditing in eQstats which is a major advantage in terms of governance, being able to have all auditing in the one place linked to the quality system.”
Where previously staff were required to enter all incidents into complex and cumbersome spreadsheets, manually extracting all data out of the clinical system, eQstats now automates the process for comprehensive reporting and making real-time assessments of risk.
It also meets evolving government requirements such as adherence to the Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS) that requires aged care and community providers to have an effective incident management system, and to report serious incidents to the Quality and Safety Commission within 24 hours of becoming aware of them.
“That’s the beauty of the system – this system is just 100 times better and it’s a total transformational thing for a business to put in place,” Stacy said.
“It’s also a very flexible system, you can change things to meet your own requirements. The system is built on international risk management standards, but you can easily change things to meet your organisational and legal needs. When the government announces it’s going to measure for a certain type of incident, the eQstats user can simply adjust the fields to ensure data for that incident is captured and reported.”
Being able to tailor reports for everybody in the organisation and external reporting is another important task eQstats makes light work of, according to Stacy, thanks to a comprehensive series of fields and filters.
“The reports are always beautifully formatted but also very flexible in their reporting; you’ve got filters so you can very easily include things and exclude things. It really does meet your requirements for whatever body or person you are reporting to. You can run a report and exclude or include all names, or exclude all compliments to focus in on complaints, or just look at one area you want to report such as food – it’s very specifically designed to meet your governance requirements.”
While understanding and responding to risks is important, the ability of eQstats to help drive overall quality improvements is also a big help.
“The risk register is linked to the improvements register, so you can evidence how your improvements and risk management relate to the data and you can drive improvement from the results of the auditing. In terms of risk, it flags increases in events because every report gives you data and graphs, also if a high-risk event is logged an email alert goes out.”
Another key appeal to eQstats is the human support system in place – the moment Stacy has a question or an ask, help is at hand.
“I’ve worked with eQstats for a long time and the support team is very responsive.”
Find out more about eQstats today: eqstats.com.au
