Care Management - WTFH?
3 minute read
Invox is a newcomer to the aged care sector, as an organisation we are less than a year old. But we've been busy, we ran the Home Care National Conference last May and have put together quite a lot of Briefings on topics that we think Home Care Package providers and the diverse mob called CHSP would be interested in.
But amongst all our work so far, it's the topic of Care Management that has really gone off the charts. Over 2,000 people registered for our Care Management Briefing on 9 July and the level of engagement in the event was simply enormous.
The Briefing chat and Q&A went off with a huge range of concerns, issues and questions. The central theme was indeed where to from here? And the other possible meaning of the acronym also featured high in the comments.
It seems the government has forgotten about the importance of Care Management. I recently wrote an article about Home Care being the poor cousin in aged care. Resi care gets all the attention while the most common government response in our sector is, delay. The Briefing reinforced this conclusion highlighting that Care Management is clearly suffering from policy neglect.
Very experienced Care Managers (and the people who support them) are currently confused about where their profession is going. They are angry the government is neither understanding their role or working with them on the planned changes for the new Support at Home program.
The Briefing underscored how the focus on clinical risk and compliance in general has grown exponentially. The government is very quick to use the stick in the form of increased compliance requirements and heavy-handed oversight. But the policy makers do not seem to have found the carrot in their work - real collaboration and helpful information about future directions for Care Management.
Although I have a background in aged care (I was CEO of one of Australia's largest home care package providers) I have spent the last decade working in the disability sector. I think there are some great lessons we can learn from the NDIS experience.
In the NDIS they announced so many things with precious little detail about what was expected. So after a while, when the government failed to give us clear direction we realised we needed to get on with the job without them. We defined what good practice looked like within the broad parameters the government had announced. We had the expertise, we knew what needed to be done and we did it.
So I say let's not wait for the government to tell us what we need to do in this space, they maybe never will. We've got the knowledge, let's get on with it and take Care Management where it needs to go.
That's not as bold as it sounds. To find inspiration for this article, I read back over the chat and Q&A comments from the Briefing and inspiration I did find. There is so much expertise in this sector, so many people who know the directions we need to be heading. Their comments and questions were just brilliant.
And while Invox is new, our leaders are not, Paul Sadler and Anna Millicer have been aged care direction setters most of their careers. Anna currently spends a lot of her time supporting Care Managers with best-practice implementation and Quality Standards compliance and she says - you have to read between the lines because a lot of the time they are not going to give you the detail.
We need to understand the intent of the Support at Home program, the incoming Aged Care Act and the new Standards. And then we need to get on with making it happen according to that intent.
Where to from here Care Management? A lot of the answer is up to us, it’s in good hands.
Notes
I have run a lot of workshops and often used to end a session by writing on the whiteboard - Where to from Here? When I sometimes used shorthand and wrote the acronym, there was often a nervous giggle in the audience which took me quite a while to catch on to.
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