Day One – Workforce – Part One
MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you, everyone. How fantastic to see so many people here in this stream, which is the
‘Workforce’ stream. Can I just check… I’m actually waiting for one of my presenters. Is Indra in the
room? No? Alright. So my name is Meryl Zweck and I'm actually the state manager for DisabilityCare
Australia in South Australia. My role this afternoon is to really chair us through this session. The
session is structured so that we have four presentations around the Practical Design Fund and then
followed by a question and answer session for about fifteen to twenty minutes.
What would be appreciated is if we could actually move through the presentations and if you have
questions, if you could jot them down, and when we actually open up the discussion, we will then
enable you to ask a question to any of our presenters. But I think we'd be keen to hear what our
presenters have to say and then to open up for questions and answers after that. The other thing and I will remind you again - is that this is actually being videotaped, so if you do have a question,
it'd be great if you could just put your hand up. We will bring a roving mic to you and we would ask
you to wait until the microphone is in front of you to speak, so that we do record your answer. So it’s
my pleasure to get us started this afternoon. I would like to introduce Soula Dagas from Interwork.
Soula will outline the training they have developed for non-government organisations to help them
improve their business processes and to get ready for DisabilityCare Australia. Thank you, Soula.
(Applause)
SOULA DAGAS:
Thank you, everyone, and good afternoon. I am the managing… sorry, I'm not managing director, I'm
the general manager of marketing and sales at Interwork. And just by way of introduction, for
anyone that doesn't know who Interwork is, we’re a South Australian based community organisation
that builds a capability and capacity of organisations and people with disabilities achieve sustainable
employment through our programs. And they include the likes of disability employment services,
accredited workplace rehabilitation services, training and our community capacity building
programs. Many not-for-profit organisations are facing their single biggest change in how they will
provide services moving forward. The program that we pull together supports their knowledge to
successfully navigate the changes through developing stronger governance structures. The program,
which is a five part series of three hour workshops, gives participants access to experienced
presenters in their respected fields to provide training and information on both governance and the
disability sector.
In addition to providing participants with the opportunity to network with like-minded individuals,
where we saw relationships and potential partnerships forged… Over 40 people from a variety of
organisations registered for the initial program that we undertook. Our participating organisations
identified many current and future challenges they do or will face. Identifying these challenges was a
key step in setting plans in place to respond to the changes in their working environment. Providing
exceptional service that meet client needs requires robust governance structures. DisabilityCare
Australia changes the way services will be purchased and organisations are required to respond to
this change to ensure viability and, most importantly, high quality services to their clients.
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Many organisations that Interwork works with have not had to deal with change to this magnitude
before. The program provides tools for senior managers and directors to make the decisions and
implement the governance structures to support organisational viability and quality service delivery.
Part one of our series discusses understanding and getting most out of your auditor and
understanding your responsibility and that of your auditors. This part of the… this part also provides
an overview of DisabilityCare Australia and the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.
Looking at effective communication with your auditor, participants were provided with strategies to
support better outcomes, including undertaking regular communication with their auditor, rather
than subsequent to any reporting dates, about your organisation's activities during the course of the
year, such as financial results, major transactions and any complex accounting issues. Seeking
support for assistance when auditor… with audit… seeking… I beg your pardon… Seeking support for
assistance with auditor commentary for design and implementation or effectiveness of key internal
controls was one of the strategies provided to receive extra value from your auditor relationship.
With auditors responsible for maintaining an attitude of professional scepticism, the top ten fraud
risk indicators that participants were provided with include key documents missing, no separation of
financial duties, accounting systems in disarray, lack of policies that establish controls, inadequate
monitoring to ensure these controls work as intended, ineffective accounting information
technology or internal auditing processes, documentation that are photocopies or have missing key,
essential data, unusual staff behaviour, tips or complaints about fraud and unethical behaviour and
lack of established code of conduct. Common red flags that participants also agreed with regarding
fraud and misappropriation included personal financial pressure, vices such as substance abuse and
gambling, extravagant purchases or lifestyles, real or imagined grievances against the organisation,
increased stress, irritability, defensiveness and argumentative behaviour, no vacations or sick leave
or excessive overtime undertaken, dominant personalities and protective of areas of administration
or missing data.
Part two of our series looks closely at governance. Participants get a deeper understanding of
common law and statutory obligations of directors as they are owed to the entity - and the entity is
defined as the owners or members. An update on the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits
Commission includes reporting requirements through registration, annual information statements,
financial information requirements, notifications of changes and record keeping. As we undertake an
harmonisation process of work health safety throughout Australia, participants are provided with
their obligations and the penalties that now apply if those are not fulfilled. Employment agreements
are an essential component to good governance. Ensuring effectiveness of agreements organisations
need to take account of sources of contractual obligations, implied terms, workplace policies
currently in place, whether or not a written contract exists - and we found that in a lot of instances,
this didn't - ways to protect your organisation and termination issues.
Sorry, before I go onto that, the top ten tips for charity directors or committee members include
know what your charity's purpose is, be clear about your role, understand the financial position of
the organisation, know your responsibilities, have a copy of your own rules, don't just follow the
crowd, know the obligations of the organisation, work as part of a team and declare and manage any
conflict of interest and always act in the best interests of the organisation.
Session three looked at the risk and opportunity and planning at board level. Looking at the
outcomes achieved during this session, highlighted on the screen for you, the session takes
participants through focusing on setting effective strategies, implementing relevant business risk
management, looking at rational and structured decision making, conduct and ethics, roles and
responsibilities for directors and for senior staff, enhanced organisational performance, committing
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to compliance requirements, succession planning an experienced chairperson, self-regulating and
monitoring board effectiveness and effective audit committee. Participants were taken through key
questions of their organisations to ask including: was there a constitution with a sample of
stakeholder… was it… I beg your pardon…was there consultation with a sample of stakeholders
through the strategic planning process? Are internal and external changes addressed during a
strategic plan review? Have too many operational actions been created in the strategic plan that
belong in operational plans? Did the board check with the CEO that the workload is actually feasible?
Is a bank reconciliation undertaken prior to reports being provided? (Bell rings) Thank you.
Our 7 steps to a successful not-for-profit include: have a plan, not just a vision, monitor your
financial position, manage your cash flow, understand the relationship between price, volume and
cost, manage growth, borrow properly and plan for a transition. Participants are taken through,
breaking planning into 7 areas. These are: purpose, product, people, place, promotion, price and
performance. By including each of these in business plans and ensuring that you address the
financial aspects of each, participants will be well on their way to having a comprehensive business
plan.
Finally, our program finishes off with pulling it all together. Based on a presentation and a Q&A with
key panellists from the sector, key take outs for participants include: ensure your organisation has an
up to date risk matrix, ensure your organisation has good policies in place, ensure board members
are fully aware of their duties and responsibilities, ensure your strategy document encapsulates the
direction the organisation wants to head in as a whole, understand the financials and their drivers
and, as a board member, ask questions - there's never a silly question. On a whole, we found
feedback quite positive to the presentation and with the tools provided, participants went away and
started planning for their future in a new environment. Thank you.
(Applause)
MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you very much, Soula. Could I please ask people at the back… there are a couple chairs down
the front, if you would like to move down and use those chairs, you'd be most welcome to. And if we
do actually sit on the ground, it would be appreciated if you could just leave enough space so that
wheelchairs can move easily in and out. Thank you. And apologies, we are getting some more chairs,
they’re on their way. So thanks very much to Soula. It is my pleasure now to introduce Ken Tapfield.
Ken is speaking on behalf of Endeavour Foundation and will present a map of workforce
development needs for the disability sector to support DisabilityCare Australia. Thanks, Ken.
KEN TAPFIELD:
Good afternoon. A little bit of background to the organisation. We were formed in 1951, when three
mothers decided they would not accept the Department of Education’s ruling in Queensland that
their children with disability could not be educated in the mainstream system. Today, we employ
over 1,800 people, we support 1,850 people with disabilities in our industries, and we care for
another 3,000 on a daily basis. Like many of our organisations, I think the challenge for us is, how do
we survive under an NDIS? There's been a lot written around skilling the workforce. There's any
number of papers by industry groups, by government and even other vested interests, saying how
we should skill our workforce. The issue that we faced in this project was how do we, in actual fact,
survive as an organisation and do we have the business skills to move into a competitive
environment and remain sustainable.
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Many years ago, I worked for the Sisters of Charity and had the opportunity to travel with a lady
called Sister Bernice - who was a colleague of Kerry Packer’s - and I asked her “Why do the charities
have private hospitals?” And she said to me, and the words resonate, “No margin, no mission.”
And I think the same principle applies to the businesses that we're running; that if we do not make
margins, there will be no opportunity to continue the good work that we do. So our dilemma
basically was facing a shifting focus from government, where we were or are funded under the
government Enterprise Arrangements, both state and federal, to a situation where we will actually
be a user pay service, which will have significant impacts upon us as businesses.
The following question to that, of course, is who pays and when, because we're moving from
payment normally in advance situation to payment in arrears. So we decided we wouldn’t map the
individual skills necessary for our general workforce to work under the system. What we focused on
was, what skills and abilities do we need in our managerial structures and our staff structures to
ensure that we continue to operate as viable businesses? To do this, what we actually did was, we
sourced the support of some external consultants who helped us develop a model framework and
answer some fundamental questions; what would we need to change in our business to operate,
and continue to operate, viably under DisabilityCare Australia? How would we know that if our
existing business practices were OK? And, of course, if we had gaps, how we were going to address
those in the time frame that we have available to us to continue to be viable?
To do that, what we basically did was develop a fundamental management business model - and
there are many models around that you could use - but we chose and modelled our own in this
regard. The model focuses on six core business areas: customer engagement, financial viability, IT
infrastructure, human resource management and practices, risk management and assessment, and
of course, innovation and growth. The people who we worked with to help us develop this model
found that these were the core areas we would need in any business operation and would need to
address to ensure that we remained commercially viable and sustainable going forward; and, more
importantly, possess the ability to grow. My CEO always talks to us about cash management and
that's something that we'll all learn very soon that becomes fundamentally important to us.
So what do we do for this exercise? What we actually do, we developed a series of questionnaires
and we went to the field with those questionnaires. We wrote to organisations and we made
available an online survey. We had focus groups, we had one on one interviews, we even actually
sought multiple responses from within the one organisation to ensure that there was a consistency
of understanding of where that particular organisation was at in the work that was to be done.
Out of it came a fair bit of information for us to work on but, fundamentally, what we actually came
up with in the end were a series of recommendations. And the recommendations… we focused in
three core areas. The first part was, in actual fact, what have we got to do to meet the requirements
under, of course, skilling our people in the sector? Now, we saw the role of government playing a
role in this. We, as organisations, have a role in this and we also require the industry councils and
skill groups to support us in this initiative, because I do not believe, through our research, that any
one organisation is capable of addressing all the issues on our own. Within each of those groups, we
had a number of recommendations. From our perspective of service providers, there’s a number of
things that we probably need to focus on and they basically are, we have developed a tool kit for you
to use to assess your business. It is available online. There were copies down at the Endeavour table
but most of them have now disappeared. You should have a look at this and you should use this to
assess your business readiness to ensure that we are in a position to understand what's required in
terms of development.
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You need to then identify the gaps and prioritise those from both a short term, medium term and
long term, because the challenges confronting us in a week's time, particularly in the trial areas, isn't
going to give you much of a long term opportunity at this point. You then need to develop your
workforce plan. Now, one of the hardest parts is working out what sort of skill sets, competencies
and qualifications we require our people to have. In the body of the main report, we have produced,
in actual fact, a mapping of all of the workforce competency and training programs that are available
through the Vocational Education and Training System for you to use. You then need to initiate that
training.
Now the challenge here is, do you have the ability in house to do it? Do you outsource it? But at this
point in time, we need to really be sure that, whilst we are focusing on the fundamental skill
development of our people caring for people with a disability, we also need to focus on the business
activities. We also then saw from the lead agency's point of view the need for them to take a more
active role in helping the sector improve its business practice. They should assist each of the
organisations, if possible, to build that business awareness. They should assist the organisations to
understand and work with the self-assessment tool that we have developed, they need to encourage
and support individual groups to seek further funding under the government funding arrangements
and, particularly, those noncompliance areas in terms of skills and competency sets.
As far as the government's perspective is concerned, we believe they need to, in actual fact, increase
the opportunity and funding that is available over the coming… over the past 18 months, all we have
seen is funding being withdrawn for the skilling of people within the disability sector, not only from
the federal level but also the state level. And I think most of you here would agree, we do not have
the financial resources to do it on our own. We believe they should fund advisory services such as
Enterprise Connect. We don't have an organisation to whom we comply for funding to support
business initiatives.
And, of course, we need to lobby the National Workforce Development Fund group for further
funding and to review the funding restrictions that are placed on organisations by contribution, to
increase our preparedness for the sector. Finally, what are we giving you? Basically, we have given
and prepared a tool kit for you to use. We have mapped and developed a set of competencies and
skill-based programs that you can use to skill your people in the organisational context and we are
certainly happy to provide any support, advice or guidance to any organisation who wants to do it.
We have spent the last 18 months in Endeavour building and mapping our workforce development
needs to be competitive in the future. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you, Ken. Before we go to our next speaker, can I just ask again, is Indra here at all from
Integrated Living? Oh, yes, great. Please, join us on the panel. Thank you. I'm very happy now to
introduce Debbie Eisenhauer. Debbie is from Ability Options and will outline their business model
that allows organisation to plan and provide a better service under DisabilityCare Australia. Thanks.
DEBBIE EISENHAUER:
Hello. Good afternoon. I’m glad Indra arrived, I didn’t want to have to talk for 14 minutes. (Laughs)
My name's Debbie Eisenhauer, I’m from Ability Options. My role at Ability Options is executive
leader of shared services, so I have responsibility for finance, IT, quality risk management and other
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administrative services. Ability Options is a New South Wales service provider that is one of two
organisations that, seven years ago, participated in the launch of… or a pilot for self-managed
services within New South Wales; and today we have 300 clients with individual packages that we're
currently supporting with intermediary services, as well as planning and facilitations services. So
from that, we’ve developed, as part of our Practical Design Fund project, a model to help
organisations build a plan management service, as well as a service delivery model within the one
organisation, and some ideas for putting into place a governance structure that enables ongoing
choice and control in decision making for participants.
And I guess one of the practical outputs of this project, which would be appealing to any CFOs in the
room, are some ideas around how you can actually modify your finance systems to be able to
provide both services; the financial intermediary services as well as… you know, working in a fee for
service environment and a block funded environment without necessarily having to invest in a new
system. So this is a summary of what our project was all about, which is developing the intermediary
and facilitation services whilst facilitating ongoing choice and control. So it's important to
understand the governance frameworks that need to be put in place around the intermediary
services and actual service provision. It's important that organisations don't encourage participants
to purchase their own services when they're actually managing the funding on behalf of the
individuals and providing any decision support. So it's really important that organisations think about
the governance structures that they put in place. And as I mentioned before, this project would be of
most use to people that have responsibility for getting operating systems and finance systems ready
for DisabilityCare.
So the process that we went through - so we already had our finance systems in place to manage the
financial intermediary services for our self-managed clients - but to understand what that would
look like in the context of DisabilityCare, we went through the process of mapping sector task
grouping so we could understand what roles and responsibilities we would have in the future
compared to what we’ve had in the past and where all the different roles and responsibilities would
sit across the sector in its entirety. So we came up with a model that looks something like this. So it's
quite difficult to read on the screen, but all this information is available as part of the pack that
we’ve prepared for providers. But you can see here, planning and budgeting and some of the
facilitation and community connection activities that organisations historically undertook, will now
be part of a government agency or DisabilityCare. And there'll be some other services that
historically we maybe hadn't provided that we will now be providing, such as plan management
services.
So it's important to understand how we're going to interact with the other agencies and then what
this would mean for your organisation in terms of the types of services that you’re going to deliver
and also how your organisation will interact with all the various agencies and stakeholders within
the sector; so this looks pretty busy. (Laughs) When we actually started to look at how our
organisation would operate, especially during the launch phase where we're still receiving block
funding for our, you know, block funded services we’d be working with DisabilityCare, potentially
providing some plan management services and also some decision support. We had to have a bit of
a think about what would that mean, and being an accountant, I needed to understand also how the
money would flow. So once you get an idea of how your organisation will be positioned in the new
environment it's a lot easier, then, to try and think about what you need to do to change your
underlying operating systems.
We then went through and looked at, well, what are the functional structures that we would need to
have within our organisation and how will we group them. So we looked at how we would group our
support services, how we would group decision support, our back office or administrative services
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and then any plan management services that we may be delivering, or financial intermediary
services. We then developed an organisational position chart, which would look different for every
organisation, but this enables us to think about where we would put governance structures and it
then also helps to understand, you know, the role that your boards would need to play in
governance structures to ensure that we have ongoing choice and control.
So then, moving forward to looking at governance structures, you really need to think about what
safeguards that will be in place within your organisation to ensure that, if you're providing decision
support services and the financial intermediary services, that that doesn't in any way compromise
the principles of choice and control. So a guy in each organisation will come up with their own
governance structures but these are some ideas that we have come up with.
So then you would need to look at your underlying operating systems, and I guess this part of our
project is where you'll be able to provide the most value for the finance people in the room. So we
looked at how we could develop our financial and operating systems to support both our service
provision and our plan management systems. So we basically replicated our company ledger and put
a clear divide between the provision of support services and the provision of intermediary services
and structured those processes in quite different ways. And depending upon… any accountants
here? (Laughs) In the room? Depending upon the flexibility of your charts you can pretty much do
that with most systems, so you don’t have to invest in something that's overly costly if your
organisation… if you're supporting a small number of clients. Most financial accounting systems will
be able to support both service provision and plan management services. So we have quite a few
resources that would help you understand how you can modify your systems to support both of
these processes. And that's it for me.
(Applause)
MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you to Debbie. I'd now like invite Indra Arunachalam from Integrated Living to present. Indra
will present their transition guide to small to medium organisations to help them adjust to the new
DisabilityCare Australia environment. Thanks.
INDRA ARUNACHALAM:
Thank you. Sorry. I was actually not scheduled to present at this one, my CEO was, but she’s down
with the flu. So I was in another session doing the first one there, run across here. So thank you and I
apologise for any anxiety it caused. OK.
The transition guide is a practical guide for providers in their journey to a person-centred and
individualised support model. Now, I need to say that this particular guide is actually targeting small
to medium businesses, so if you're big, I actually found that you guys all had more resources and had
a different need, so I apologise if it's not quite to your need. So what actually changes? We move
from programs with guidelines to a person-centred that promotes choice and control. We move
from block funding to individual support scheme where funding is allocated to the person. There’s
no more block funding to providers, there’s no more quarterly payment that comes into our bank
account. As somebody said, it's going to be cash flow, watching that space.
I have also put in there the actual page in the transition guide that you can… so that you don't have
to write notes. This is the transition guide that you can download from our website. The National
Disability Services report ‘Preparing the Disability Sector for the New World’, January 2012,
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identified five pressure points for service providers, placing people with disability at the centre of
service delivery. It is about proactively giving choice and control of the individualised support
package over to the consumer and building capacity to self-manage. Strengthening community
network connection; it's about building local community connections to help people with disability
to access mainstream disability and community supports and, I think, if you listened to today's
morning session, they also talk about how it's not going to be DisabilityCare that's going to be
funding some of the almost intra-structural sort of needs within schools and hospitals, but those
particular agencies themselves will have to come to the realisation that they need to make that
investment to create an inclusive society.
Building workforce capacity, supporting people with disability, their carers and families to have
choice and control over the selection, engagement and professional development of their preferred
support worker. Market environment; operating in a competitive environment, sorry, where we
have to chase the consumer and then keep them. And then, finally, being effective and accountable.
Having greater understanding and transparency of our cost pricing structures to support informed
choice that delivers best value for support packages and I think the two speakers before me have
already highlighted that as well.
So what do we do? When we started working on our own transition for the new paradigm, we
identified five key operational areas that were considered as a high priority for transition. They were
service deliveries… service inquiries, service delivery, recruitment and training, subcontracting,
accountability and reporting. With each of these priorities, the transition guide will actually look at
the challenges that providers could face, it explores how providers can meet these challenges, it
identifies the required future business capabilities and critical success factors; critical success factors
so that you actually know when you’ve actually achieved what… when you’ve actually met the
challenge. The guide also identifies some likely change management strategies and the associated
risks or adverse consequences if these change management strategies are not implemented, or not
implemented well.
I would like to stress that the transition guide is a starting point or a ‘how to guide’ for service
providers to start preparing for the new paradigm of DisabilityCare Australia. How do you use the
guide? I would seriously recommend that you actually appoint one person to lead the transition
initiative within your organisation. This person should identify and invite key internal stakeholders
for the organisational transition. The stakeholders should prepare for this particular transition by
becoming very, very familiar with all the resources that are available on the DisabilityCare website,
as well as just this transition guide. This transition guide is only 20 odd pages. Not too much really.
Using the actual transition guide; what Integrated Living did was, after we developed this guide, we
actually went out and conducted seven workshops in regional New South Wales and Queensland.
We had over 70 participants from 44 different providers. We… so what we recommend when you do
this yourself is to conduct these workshops to identify what are your organisational transition
challenges. Once you have identified everything, then I would suggest you group it into different
operational areas. You can follow similar lines as these people here suggested, or you can follow
what is in our particular guide. Then break out into small groups and get each small group to own a
particular operational area and then to just brainstorm how they can meet these challenges and
also, like I said, identify what are the required future business capabilities to make that transition.
You need to be specific and you need to include critical success factors.
Sorry. And then you basically will come up with your own transition plan. You know, this transition
plan, it has to be based on consensus from within that actual group and then you need to work out
what needs to happen first, second, third and so on. We talked about immediate, medium, as well as
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long term priorities. And then, when you make this particular sequence of events, please take into
account the current workload of key people. It's… I mean… and holiday plans as well. Develop a
project plan and allocate resources to make the transition. Allocate a project manager; it really helps
to give ownership of it, but the project manager doesn't actually end up doing everything because all
of these changes have to be embedded within your organisation structure as well as processes.
Allocate a budget to it, it's going to be a lot of work because the shift is actually quite… it’s going to
have to be quite fundamental, it’s got to be cultural, it’s many-layered. So commitment and support
from key stakeholders is very important.
Some of the challenges and priorities identified by some of the workshop participants include
marketing and branding themselves to consumers and community, service and business models,
matters including person-centred model, workforce development, flexibility in service delivery,
building consumer capacity to self-manage, educating the communities and families to create
awareness of the new DisabilityCare model, as well as building community connections and
relationships of local providers. But a lot of them also talked about how to inform and embed the
new culture from board to support workers and that's one of the key things that they said they
needed to do.
We also validated our particular approach, whatever suggestions we came up with in this transition
guide. We held three consumer focus groups with people with disability, their carers and families, as
well as some support workers, and asked them how they wanted person-centred support to be
delivered in a manner that facilitates consumer choice and control. We engaged the Centre for
Disability Studies from Sydney University to facilitate and report on the findings from this focus
group. The central themes that emerged from these focus groups were current lack of respite, care
and hope for increased access under this DisabilityCare system, the need for more flexible services
to fit divergent needs and the desire to increase quality staff support to achieve greater
independence in participation, access, choice and control.
You can access the transition guide from our website under our ‘news and events’ tab,
‘publications’. You can also contact me if you want to delve deep… dig deeper into what I mean or
explore things or just find out what other workshop participants had to say about things as well.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
MERYL ZWECK:
So, thank you to all of our four presenters. We will give them a final applause at the end of the
session. I think they’ve provided us with a lot of very useful information and also, potentially, access
to resources. We will now open up for a question and answer session. If you aren't able to get my
attention and have your question dealt with, please also follow up with the four presenters and
direct your questions to them over our afternoon tea. Thank you.
Could I just remind you that it's a very, very large audience? I appreciate your patience. Could you
either raise your hand or signal that you would like to ask a question and please wait for the
microphone to come to you? So if we open for questions now, please. Over here on my right hand
side.
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MARIANN McNAMARA:
Hi. Mariann McNamara, Brain Injury Network, South Australia. I’m just interested in whether
DisabilityCare Australia will be setting quality standards or specific standards where organisations
will want to deliver, perhaps, services as well as the plan facilitation management.
MERYL ZWECK:
So I’ll ask whether or not one of my panel members would like to answer that? So my understanding
is that there is the ability for you to be both the service provider and a plan manager, however, you
do need to address issues around potential conflicts of interest and how, from a governance
perspective, you may be managing those aspects.
DEBBIE EISENHAUER:
I can provide some answer to that but it's not the complete answer. If you have seen the recent
provider registration kit that came out, they did ask for organisations that were wanting to deliver
both plan management services and disability services that they demonstrate their governance
structures to support choice and control.
MERYL ZWECK:
Further questions? Over here on my left.
SPEAKER:
Thank you. Can you hear? My question was in relation to our organisation that provides individual…
or works with people with individual support packages and working with the families and their
carers around clients’ rights and responsibilities. And one of the hurdles is looking at people with
disability being… I guess, looking at the responsibilities around cancellation fees and where people
are committed to having staff come to their home and providing with the support and our staff turn
up and they’re not there. And so, therefore, we have this process in terms of, how do we then pay
our staff and what are people's responsibilities in relation to receiving a service? We spend a lot of
time talking about client's rights, but I also think we need to look at some education and some work
around clients’ responsibilities, because that's an issue for workforce planning.
MERYL ZWECK:
So can I check with anybody on our panel, would like to address that question?
KEN TAPFIELD:
I can't really talk about the particular issue you raised there but one of the things that we're going to
face is that we are working with a myriad of industrial awards and agreements that, in themselves,
may be quite restrictive in terms of, well, their flexibility to allow us to do an hour-on-hour under
those award conditions. So we do need to give some serious thought of how we actually work within
the current industrial relations framework and the awards and conditions we have, whilst addressing
the issue of what happens when a client pulls out on us and we’re left holding the bag on no fee for
service, because it wouldn't take too much of that to really cause problems for the organisation from
a cash flow point of view.
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MERYL ZWECK:
Anybody else from the panel? Alright, thank you. Further questions? Straight here in front of me.
KIM WINDSOR:
Oh, hi. I'm Kim Windsor and I am a workforce consultant and was also on the expert panel on
‘Workforce’, and I'm interested to take up some of the comments that you're making from
Endeavour. So I think it's terrific that you did focus on the management issues, because this sector
has a higher than average trained workforce at the VET level, but I guess I would have liked to hear a
bit more about - particularly if you’re wanting government to orient training funds to address the
issues - what are the management skills that you were actually looking at? Can you give us examples
of those things?
KEN TAPFIELD:
Yeah, one of the first issues that we looked at was of educating our managers in finance and cash
flow and understanding how that's going to work. We also have skilled them in the area of risk
management. We have, across the organisation, skilled our people in risk management, which is one
of those key areas they need to understand the risk management methodology and apply risk
assessment to the programs and activities that are being undertaken; particularly where it could be
of a financial impact for the organisation going forward. And we’ve also looked around customer
service, customer service orientation.
They are the core areas that we’ve been focusing on at this time, as well as, of course, making sure
that our IT infrastructures and our HR practices, and can we afford to run in-house payroll services,
et cetera. So we’ve been focusing on those areas. There are myriad of programs available;
certificates in management, frontline management, diplomas of management, et cetera. We believe
it's probably better to have a set of core competencies or skills that we skill people in for business
activity that doesn't necessarily end up in an accredited qualification but ends up with a series of
skills and competencies for the management or the senior staff of the organisation to be able to
work within.
MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you. So, sorry, over here on the left, right at the very back and then I think we have got one
question here. So perhaps we’ll start with the lady... I think someone got a microphone just here, did
they? Oh. OK. We’ve got someone with a microphone. Great. (Laughs)
SPEAKER:
Hi. Thank you. What is your criteria to be able to do the DisabilityCare? Do you have to be a nonprofit, a profit organisation or it can be a neighbour, Mrs Smith, that the client likes. What is the
criteria that you need to be in the DisabilityCare? Thank you.
MERYL ZWECK:
Sorry, can I just clarify; are you talking about in the delivery of supports?
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SPEAKER:
In the delivery of support, in the delivery of the services for the client.
MERYL ZWECK:
I think that I'm probably not in a position to give you a complete and full response at this point in
time because it will depend on the type of support that you are actually registering to deliver. So the
best that I could probably say at this point in time is to encourage you to have a look on our website.
There is information now there about how to register as a provider, the categories of support, and it
also gives you information around the terms and conditions of business that apply if you register
with DisabilityCare Australia.
So just here and then there's a lady in the white, thanks.
PAUL VITTLES:
Paul Vittles from Instinct and Reason. I'm interested to know to what extent you are basically
adapting your core business model to the new environment, or the extent to which you are
introducing a new business model to deal with the new environment, I know from the UK, there's an
increasing use of quite flexible social enterprise models and I'm wondering what the situation is here
in Australia.
KEN TAPFIELD:
The model we chose uses, I suppose, a standard small business… it can be predicated on a small
business model. The core components that you would need to successfully operate as a provider of
services to customers, and that's how we have used it. I think that, going forward, there will have to
be greater flexibility, but the approach we adopted at the time we did the study was basically to say,
‘What are the core business skills that we need as providers at this time in order to continue to
function under a DisabilityCare Australia arrangement or an NDIS?’ I don't believe it's going to be the
last part of our journey but I believe at this point in time, we tried to bring some substance, in fact,
to say, well, here's what we should be looking at as organisations moving from that client service
focus to a commercial orientation working in a competitive marketplace.
MERYL ZWECK:
Anybody else from the panel like to answer?
INDRA ARUNACHALAM:
At Integrated Living, we are actually overhauling the entire organisation, so we're putting everyone
through, whether… it's just not the case managers, care coordinators, frontline care services staff
but the back office staff, the HR people, the finance people, they're all attending - actually, they have
all attended person-centred care training by the Centre for Disability Studies. So really… and we
start, as well, by not only treating our clients in that way, we’re practising by treating our staff and
each other in person-centred approaches. So it is fundamentally changing everything. And at
Integrated Living we provide disability care as well community care, or home care as it’s going to be
called, for older people at home and that’s… consumer directed care is coming into that as well. For
us, that's just the way it's going to be.
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MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you. So, lady there… yes.
JULIA GILCHRIST:
Hi, my name is Julia Gilchrist and I'm from the ACT Council of Social Services. I'm from a peak
organisation and one thing I'm looking at is how do you get people to change their thinking? The
staff that you have working with you, how do you get them to commit and come on board? What
did you do? Anybody on the panel! (Laughs)
KEN TAPFIELD:
Thank you. We heard a bit earlier about one of the projects about staff retention and we, as an
organisation, face significant turnover so keeping consistent practice becomes important. What
we’ve tried to do is to build the culture through a series of practices in terms of methodologies. You
know, if we're going to do risk assessments at the organisation, we do that. We train people in
project management; so if you are part of a project team, you’ve all undertaken the same training
so, therefore, you understand the same practices. But the challenge I think for us, as an
organisation, we lose 300 odd people a year throughout the organisation just because of our size.
But trying to continually skill that workforce is not only a challenge for us but a significant challenge
for any organisation where you're losing a lot of those skills.
And I think the gentleman who presented to us earlier hit it right in the head; the funding is low, the
work is hard, it's not pretty, but we try to do it and we trade… and organisations and governments
trade on us because we do want to make a difference. We wouldn't be in the industry if we didn't.
So they are the things we're trying to do. The culture is driven by the executive as well, of course.
Like, I mean, if we’re going to drive change, we drive change through the top, and that's what we try
to do with Endeavour. We don't always get it right but we're certainly working towards that. We
have skilled all our workforce across in disability for those who work… support workers, et cetera.
We’ve skilled all our management. We have a standing practice that if you occupy a management
role, you're required to undertake a management program. So we make sure that we continually
skill our people in the areas they're involved in.
SOULA DAGAS:
I'd also like to add to that. Interwork is over 20 years old now and has certainly evolved over that
time so, from a cultural perspective, I take Ken's point and I'll agree with it; very much top down, in
terms of, if there's no buy in at the top, it's certainly not going to succeed. It needs to be a
multilayered approach, as well. In terms of... I can't stress enough - and coming from a comms
background - communication is key. Reinforcement of key messages; if you think you’ve said it one
too many times, I think you should say it a few more times after that as well. The other areas that
we’ve looked at in terms of cultural change is taking a bit of a gap analysis as well. You may think
that your organisation is at a certain level but it may not be; so understanding what you want your
culture to be, where you are at the moment and then plotting your program through there. And it's
not a project that is done and dusted at any point in time. It is evolving. An area that you could also
look at is… putting in place - because we do have staff that are overworked and take on lots of roles but putting cultural champions in at different levels, so it’s not just the domain of HR or your OD
departments, it's very much across the board.
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DEBBIE EISENHAUER:
One of the initiatives that we've… well, we started to put in place 18 months ago is to break down
our finance system structures so that we have cost centre profit and loss statements for every
service that we operate, whether it be block funded or on a fee for service basis and have given the
service managers, who traditionally never had any financial accountability, accountability for having
a financially sustainable service. So we train them in understanding, you know, what their P&L
should look like and they’ve all had to participate in the budget process and we do a quarterly reforecast so that, you know, every, you know, every quarter, you know, we scrutinise the cost centre
P&Ls right down at a service level and that process is really playing a part in educating people and
changing their thinking around how we’re going to have to operate into the future.
INDRA ARUNACHALAM:
Some of the barriers we faced was… previously we, you know, were really working on financial
sustainability as well as efficiency model. Person-centred actually goes the other way. It talks about
customising things, you know, there's going to be no economies of scale from block funding to
individualise, you know, there’s no more robbing Peter to pay Paul and all that sort of stuff. So what
we found when we started with our person-centred training was actually, all of a sudden, the care
services people who’d always been, you know, championing these things were allowed to actually
be the head and directors; so that was quite a good exercise really. And it was no longer the
corporate services that had to tell you, you know, you really need to do it this way to achieve these
targets but, guess what? The targets are now really focusing on clients and consumers. So that was
quite empowering for our care services to do that.
MERYL ZWECK:
Thank you. OK, so we’ve got hands everywhere. So if we go one here in the middle and then at the
back there. Thanks.
LOUISE HARVEY:
I just wanted to ask though - Louise Harvey from Cerebral Palsy - there's a tension though, isn’t
there, between financial sustainability and the emphasis on personal care? And the thing that's
taxing my mind at the moment is, the actual models of support I see in place either aren't financially
sustainable or, perhaps, aren't as individualised and personalised as much as we would like them to
be. But how do we drive the change in models of care and often very intensive support that's
required in order to make it cost effective? Because in the end of the day, part of the choice for
people, I think, is going to be how far will their money go - because it won't be a bottomless pit - and
so what quality and extent of care and support can they get for those dollars? So it's a real dilemma
here because I don't see the two debates necessarily coming together and, until we get some
different debates about different models of support that have an eye to the financial bottom line,
we are going to be in some deep trouble, I think. That's just a thought. Somebody new to the sector.
I’d really like to hear what people had to say.
MERYL ZWECK:
Could I ask just one of our panel members… to invite them to respond?
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SPEAKER:
(inaudible)
(Laughter)
DEBBIE EISENHAUER:
I agree.
(Laughter)
KEN TAPFIELD:
It is a tension. You know, I’ve stood up there and talked about running it as a business and then
we’re saying saying, ‘Well, what about the client, the customer?’ The issue is - and I think we face
the same challenge - is what is your unit price you are going to charge. And if I reflect on Victoria when I was in health - was casemix funding, and it changed the focus from the patient to throughput
because you only got paid when you got the outcome. So it is a tension, and it's a tension that we
know that if we don't manage the books, that we may not be sustainable and, therefore, the
customer may suffer because we may not be able to provide that service. The other issue is, what is
the real cost of our services going to be versus what will we be funded to provide. And they’re the
challenges that we're facing… trying to come to terms with those and, of course, at the moment,
we're not sure what is going to be available in terms of payments. Particularly…
SPEAKER:
(inaudible)
KEN TAPFIELD:
Yeah. It comes out, so we'll know then. Yeah. Sorry. So… yeah, so that's basically… I believe it is a
tension. It's a tension of the business versus the customer and for us, as providers and services,
we've got to remain that viability to continue the mission or to continue to care for customers.
INDRA ARUNACHALAM:
Sorry. I actually think the current transparent arrangements that are going to come in with
DisabilityCare will actually make it easier for us to have that conversation with our clients because
we all know that's only so much money, so that… when we held our consumer focus group, we
started by talking, you know, “You have a money tree. What would you like?” And then we said,
“Oh, guess what? There’s only half a money tree. What would you like now? You know, what are
your priorities?” The message that came across loud and clear was that, let the person with the
disability, their carers, make that choice. That's it. That's all. Very easy, very simple message for us.
So don't… yeah. We don't have to be everything for them and this package doesn’t have to deliver
everything.
MERYL ZWECK:
So, unfortunately, we only have time for one question and I think I already pointed to a lady at the
back, so…
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KATE SELLICK:
Hello and - Kate at thepeoplebar - the question is really an observation on earlier regarding… I think
Ken, you were asked the question about your business model. Six years of working in aged care, and
without getting too lost in translation and the transition, what we learned was simplification was
probably more important, certainly for those people that were leading the change. I guess the
question for the panel that I've got is, my eclectic experience in the wonderful world of aged care
was predicated both compliance and performance on continuous improvement. What sort of
approaches did you discover in your focus groups or indeed, what you do today, that you will be
using that can help more service providers implement those type of processes?
MERYL ZWECK:
Again, I think we’ve probably only got time for one panel member to respond, so...
SOULA DAGAS:
An area that we looked at was, it really comes down to a cultural shift as well, so when you're
looking at a compliance and a performance - or having a focus on those - is having a compliance
culture, and that can sometimes be seen as a negative, when there's some real quite positives and
business opportunities to be had to having a compliance focus. In terms of performance, we had a
very similar situation in disability employment and I also experienced that through financial services,
where it was sort of deregulated to a certain extent in superannuation. It comes down to a cultural
shift and there is no magic pill that will happen overnight. It's about putting a program in place and
evolving the organisation, is what we see happening.
MERYL ZWECK:
Well, thank you, Soula. Thank you, all. Can we please thank our presenters?
(Applause)
MERYL ZWECK:
And it is now time for afternoon tea, which is served down in the foyer on the ground floor. So thank
you everybody.
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