We all know that to create a great home care policy, it’s essential we cover everything from end-of-life through to environmental factors day-to-day. Providing excellent quality home care that meets government requirements are the name of the game.
Or is it?
At Exsitu, we believe true person-centred care doesn’t come from only meeting government guidelines. Compliance is essential. But we don’t believe that one size fits all clients. We recognise that sometimes, even the most well intended aged care provider can get way too caught up in efficient delivery across a large volume of clients, they forget to create space for individual experience.
So, how do you scale your delivery but still provide an attractive and strong home care policy without losing the individual within?
The secret sauce is in how you well you integrate individual values into your home care policy. Here’s how
Matching your values with the clients
Each home care provider needs to adhere to policies and frameworks that cover governance, workplace health and safety, and recruitment.
In among these important policy bones also exist softer and far more personalised aspects of home care. These include what a personal definition of day-to-day care might look like. What your points of differences may be as a home care provider. Or where dignity, risk and individual choice reside.
On top of having compliance and client satisfaction at the centre of the home care policy experience, every provider has to stay updated and in line with the changing regulations.
How do you manage the change management required on an operational level while also keeping your individual clients as happy as possible?
By matching your values with your clients.
Here are some of the ways you can match values effectively:
- Start the conversation with values at the centre of policy design. Treat the experience as a way to get to know the person, not just the answers you seek to design the care plan itself
- Be open and transparent about how feedback, consultation and implementation work. Encourage your clients to engage with sharing their own thoughts, feelings, ideas and views right from the beginning of the consultation process
- For existing clients, allow for time to communicate changes as they arise. Giving your clients time to adjust as well as the opportunity to respond to the changes in kind helps reduce the potential for negative reactions to government regulations or other impacts down the line
- Understand your client’s values and what matters the most to them. This helps you practically assess what areas of the home care policy may need further finessing and discussion prior to agreeing on the foundation policy and/or any subsequent changes
By understanding what matters to your client on a granular level, you can make them feel heard and valued as part of the selection and implementation process of their home care plan.
Defining the softer aspects
Photo by Sven Mieke via unsplash.
Sometimes, we struggle to articulate what our idea of dignity, choice and wellbeing entail. We also share potential culturally based misconceptions and stigmas when it comes to open and honest discussing of what healthy ageing or end-of-life support may look like.
However, you can always engage someone in a conversation about what they do and don’t like. From these simple understandings of how a person thinks and feels, you can get a greater insight into what they value.
Once you understand what a client values, the following concepts become easier to articulate:
- Wellbeing and what that looks like in a physical, emotional and psychological sense
- What a good day looks like and what a day that doesn’t feel so great may contain
- Where the difference between preserving an individual’s dignity and what is not a worthwhile risk to that person reside
- What choices are worth preserving over compromising or abandoning in favour of others
- How much care and support is useful – and how much is stifling or degrading.
ExSitu understands that not all decisions have equal weight. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. That’s why we developed the Hierarchy of Values.
The Hierarchy of Values is a simple yet robust and effective model that allows the person designing their home care policy to give a true value to what matters most. Through providing common behavioural forks specific to care environments, we ask each person to set their standard of care and build an experience that highlights where every aspect of their care falls without the usual checkboxes or yes and no answers.
Our software supplies a proper representation of a person’s most granular choices. And this then forms the basis for all kinds of healthcare, end-of-life and day-to-day care decision-making.
Accessible and transparent, both the person receiving the care and home care provider delivering it have an agreed baseline. One that includes what a definition of a good day through to a good death actually mean to work towards.
The end result means a client’s values have a priority. And all invested parties share a workable model with the same baseline of understanding.
That way, satisfaction with the client’s level of person-centred care often exceeds compliance needs. This helps reduce the potential of customer complaints while increasing the trust between client and provider in the process.
Implementing your home care policy well
Home care policy forms can be daunting. How they are explained or delivered can also vary with who is delivering the information.
Not so with ExSitu. Our software is a friendly, easy-to-use application that anyone can access and make use of. All you need is internet access and a browser.
That means the client is often the one articulating their care and making their own choices in their own time and on their own terms. This reduces the potential for technology or training creating barriers to what is shared in the final care documents.
Finished reports that include the Hierarchy of Values, and an advance care plan can be directly implemented without the need for complex integrations or expensive custom software.
The client can save and send through finished reports directly to everyone involved in their home care provision in a few simple clicks. That includes home care providers through to friends and family actively seeking a role in the care provided.
Creating great home care policies with values works
We all want to feel valued and listened to. Through ExSitu, every single person receives the individual care and attention their home care policy deserves.
We’ve done this in a few ways:
- Our software asks questions in a way that is free from bias or assumption. That way, you can articulate what values and care look like to the individual without having to worry about inadvertent cultural barriers
- We put the person at the centre of person-centred care. Our software is designed to help even the most nervous or technophobic person focus on themselves. We choose to ask open ended questions, to articulate what matters and to get the client visualising what a good care experience looks like to them. That way, we capture a closer approximation of the person, not their idea of what aged care is meant to mean
- We’ve integrated the aged care standards policy into how we articulate care. As seasoned practitioners in the aged care arena, we’re adept at breaking down the policy and procedure into terms that connect with the person. We make meeting compliance and the changing nature of regulations simpler through designing a product based on person-centred care principles with individual values in mind. This essentially means we’ve been delivering on aged care principles set down in the reforms since the reforms were even handed down. And we’ll continue to do so with quality assurance at the heart of the design and our training methodologies for your peace of mind.
When you raise the quality of the intelligence and information you receive from a client, you can raise the level of home care you provide.
