2019-Wesley-Mission-Annual-Report - Flipbook - Page 42
Our operations
Accountability and
safeguarding
We walk alongside people in some
of the most vulnerable moments of
their lives. And we take seriously
our responsibility to provide them
with safe, high quality care. So,
as we work towards 50 per cent
growth by 2021, we’re ensuring
we have the rigorous governance
structures to underpin this
growth and an infrastructure for
transparency and accountability
across the organisation.
Keeping children safe
Wesley Mission has a long history of working with
children and families to create safe environments
for vulnerable children, helping them reach their
full potential.
Ensuring the safety of children, whether they’re in
our care, accessing our services, or indirectly
impacted by our work, is paramount. To do this,
we’ve been engaging our staff organisation-wide–
not only those who work directly with children–to
raise their awareness of child safety.
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In an organisation like Wesley Mission, with such a
significant breadth of services and geographical
reach, this can be challenging. So we’ve been
developing and implementing improved recording
and reporting systems for child safety monitoring
and action and ensuring compliance with all critical
legislation.
Over the past 12 months, our progress includes:
• establishing a centralised child protection team
for out of home care
• establishing a child safety implementation group
that includes executive managers from across all
of Wesley Mission’s services, and serves as a
forum for managers to identify, plan, action, and
review improvements in our child safety policies
and practices
• developing centralised record storage
• introducing online critical incident reporting
• introducing major improvements to staff
recruitment and training that applies child safe
categories to indicate how child related a
position is
• examining all policies and procedures to ensure
they reflect our commitment to child safety,
protection and participation
• giving children a voice through a child safety
compliments and complaints system that allows
us to capture, analyse and efficiently act on
information.
Over the next year we’ll continue to focus on
strengthening our policies and raising organisationwide awareness. Specific plans over the coming 12
months include:
• expanding our child protection team
• upgrading online critical incident reporting
systems
• aligning our human resource management
systems to increase transparency and oversight
of employment requirements
• e
ducating staff through the Child Safe e-learning
modules developed by the Office of the
Children’s Guardian.
Organisation-wide accountability for
clinical services
In 2017/18, Wesley Mission implemented a clinical
governance framework to ensure organisation-wide
accountability for delivering safe, high quality
clinical care across our services and minimise risk
to our clients.
The framework sets out the structures, relationships,
systems and processes through which governing
bodies, managers, clinicians and staff share
responsibility and accountability for client care. It
applies to all our Wesley Mission staff who are
registered or accredited with a professional body
and share responsibility for clinical care to Wesley
Mission clients. That includes temporary agency
workers and external contractors providing allied
health services for Wesley Mission.
The framework is underpinned by the four pillars of
clinical governance: clinical effectiveness, clinical
risk management, an effective workforce and client
participation. And over the past 12 months, we’ve
focused on setting up the framework and
supporting staff to understand their responsibilities
within it. This has included ensuring consistent and
regular reporting on a range of clinical indicators.
In the coming year, we’ll continue to support staff to
understand and implement policies and practices
within the framework, and we’ll begin to identify and
support changes based on the information we
capture. For example, in a nursing home we report
the number of falls with injury, so if we can pinpoint
a particular trend we can distinguish if the cause is a
policy, procedure or education issue, and we can
work to improve the outcomes.
Underpinning growth with improved risk
management
In 2017/18, Wesley Mission made significant
progress towards our strategic objective to develop
a risk-intelligent culture, by implementing a risk
management framework and the supporting
processes to bring about cultural change. We’ve
undertaken a significant amount of planning,
strategy, documentation and system design work
that will ultimately lead to improved processes and
more efficient ways of working.
We identified a list of strategic risk categories, and
developed a key risk register that we’ve linked to
organisational risk appetite. This year, we’ll continue
to develop standardised risk registers across the
business to ensure we’re always focussed on the
highest risk and highest value activities.
We’ve examined all of the data we collect, including
incidents, complaints and adverse audit findings.
And over the coming year, our focus will be
on automating processes for capturing that
information to facilitate better reporting, outlining
clear ownership and escalation paths, and
clarifying steps that need to be taken to address
specific risks.
Laying the foundation for a secure future
In 2017/18, we began developing a business
continuity process that includes a framework for
managing critical events.
We’ve worked with each of our different service
areas and teams to understand and plan for a
comprehensive response to a range of scenarios.
That includes analysing systems and understanding
what would happen if they went down, how long
it would take to get them back up and running,
and specific processes and protocols for
such situations.
Supporting this is an integrated incident
management system for critical incidents. If there
is a critical incident staff can now log the incident
into a central system that will direct it to the right
person for action. This also provides better
visibility to management on how critical incidents
are being addressed.
Empowering our staff to manage legal risk
We examined the legal needs across the breadth of
our varied services and functions and have begun
rolling out a new legal process and engagement
model. It’s based on the concept of legal selfservice, and it empowers managers by giving them
the delegation of authority to approve what they
need to do within their function.
To support the new process, we developed tools
and resources including standard templates and a
live contracts registration system. Ultimately
managers will be able to request legal advice online,
which will be linked to a central registry for
contracts. Users will be able to view their request
and its progress. Once the system is fully
operational, we expect to see an improvement in the
quality of our contracting relationships with
suppliers and clients.
Protecting the privacy, dignity and
confidentiality of our clients
Over the past two years, we’ve worked on unifying
and capturing data across the entire organisation to
help us understand our clients and make our
services more efficient, person-centred and tailored
to the needs of the people we serve. Alongside this
work has been a focus on data security to protect
the privacy, dignity and confidentiality of the people
we work with.
We’re privileged to hold people’s trust and when
people share sensitive and personal information that
is critical to their care, we must protect this
information and ensure it is only accessible to the
relevant people who need it to deliver services.
In the last 12 months, we’ve been testing a new
information management system that focuses on
de-identifying and compartmentalising data so that
we can protect client confidentiality in line with
recent changes to the Privacy Act, while ensuring
the right people have access to the information they
need to deliver safe, quality, person-centred care.
We have now begun implementing these processes
across all our services.
Aligning projects to our strategic intent
Improved governance of projects to ensure
consistency across the organisation and that they
are in-line with the strategic intent of the Board has
been a key area of focus for senior leadership. The
combined expertise of this group brings increased
discipline to decision making and helps to
effectively align resources to achieve our strategic
objectives.
Other areas of significant transformation include the
implementation of projects to streamline and update
our payroll function, a review of business continuity
plans to secure our continued ability to function in a
range of scenarios and an integrated incident
management system for critical incidents.
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