The shift to person-centred care in Australia is about increasing the capacity for aged care providers to provide custom, quality, and individualised care. It also provides a unique opportunity to be a cut above the rest for customer service in the aged care field.
As aged care providers, this is your opportunity to not only meet the milestones and targets set by the government, but to adopt a framework that helps make you more attractive to families while providing the service your clients want.
Adopting a person-centred care model means:
Understanding the impact of individual goals
You can’t plan goals without understanding what a person values. Making sure you have an accurate picture of the goals your clients have as they age is all about understanding what matters on a short-, medium- and long-term basis. That way, you can tailor services to the individual without risking offering programs and offering that gain little to no following.
It may take research and consultation to get the mix right, however, fulfilling individual goals provides many positive knock-on effects, including:
· Making for happier, healthier, more content residents
· Alleviating the stress and anxiety loved ones may feel. And reducing the labour spent managing their expectations and concerns
· Providing a demonstratable model that lends itself well to Quality Assurance compliance reporting
· Creating repeatable yet adaptable and customised frameworks that help you meet the needs of all your residents now and in the long term.
Balancing dignity of risk effectively
Providing dignity and choice to clients while reducing your risk as a centre should be the cornerstone of how you operate. Luckily, rights-based care and person-centred care create the conditions that support these aims.
Putting dignity of risk at the heart of your planning provides the opportunity to:
· Understand the values of the individual in your care in an intimate and informed way
· Provide a customised care experience that is unique to that person’s wishes
· Articulating what is not acceptable on an individual level with care choices, treatment options or if the person loses capacity and cannot make care-based decisions for themselves
· Reduce the risk of removing someone’s autonomy or dignity by understanding what risks they find acceptable to take to achieve personal well-being.
By documenting an accurate depiction of what the individual sees as acceptable, reasonable, and rewarding, it reduces the emotional labour when making choices for the individual for carer and family alike.
Championing aged care
When you offer customised care matched to the person’s needs, wants and wishes, you can allay their fears not only about your centre but also about the industry.
Breaking down the stigma associated with care facilities and making them a more attractive, viable choice for Australian families is a necessary part of creating a functioning care model. We all have a duty to ensure that Australians don’t deprive themselves of quality care through misinformation or fear.
By providing person-centred care, you:
· Create a care experience your clients love. This can be useful in sharing testimonials, receiving public relations opportunities and/or promoting a positive relationship with the public
· Increase positive word of mouth and the potential for earlier adoption of aged care services
· Provide better outcomes for people who make use of aged care through the customisation process, lower resistance to entry, and the early adoption of support
· Normalise the use of all kinds of care services through leading by example.
By championing person-centred care and its value to the elderly community, we can help raise awareness of the positive steps the aged care industry is taking to meet demand.
Working with families to reduce stress and heartache
By providing appropriate care plans for life in aged care or end-of-life, we have a genuine opportunity to reduce the effects and potential for trauma for thousands of Australian families.
It’s difficult for families to understand how customised person-centred care can be if they are only viewing it from the outside. It’s especially true if the person is already grieving the changes and/or losses experienced by their much-loved family member. Adding the inexperience of care and you see the importance of a demonstrable roadmap to their loved ones’ health and wellbeing.
Person-centred care with documented care plans gives you:
· A tangible roadmap from the social, psychological, emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual wellbeing of a person
· The ability to tie that roadmap to actionable ideas and activities families can understand
· The opportunity to hear the family while still advocating for the individual in care.
This also trickles down to educate the families about their own care needs in the future.
Raising the bar on Australian aged care
By using person-centred and rights-based care, we’re developing a model that sets a new gold standard in aged care provision. With the shift to values based, person-centred care, Australia not only reforms aged care locally.
We can also:
· Market the Australian quality approach to other lucrative markets within Asia-Pacific
· Test and develop models that raise the dignity of people with disabilities
· Reform aged care in Australia to be more inclusive of the Indigenous, Person of Colour and LGBTQIA+ experience
When you think about it that way, compliance has provided an exciting opportunity to create better relationships with your teams, clients, and their families.
How ExSitu can help
ExSitu provides an easy-to-use online care plan platform that creates a blueprint of the individual’s care needs. By documenting care on a granular level, we can help inform the aged care, palliative care and end-of-life experience. Our simple yet effective questions together with the Hierarchy of Values create a robust foundation of information you can use to provide care.
This person-centred care plan articulates:
· How a person wants their day-to-day needs met
· What a person values the most with their health and well-being
· If medical events occur, what action is likely preferred
· What dignity and risk look like when making care-related decisions
It can also help aged care staff, medical professionals and loved ones make those care related decisions with less stress and impact.
Want to know more about person-centred care plans?
ExSitu has worked with individuals and all kinds of aged care companies and facilities to investigate and capture thousands of care plans. These person-centred care plans work as a guide to everyone on how to respect, provide dignity to, and give support to the individual in all kinds of circumstances.
We offer both DIY online care plans and facilitators that can help guide individuals with their care plan. And we offer training at facility and company level to ensure your experience of an ExSitu care plan creates the best possible individual blueprint.
