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 and then any plan management services that we may be delivering, or financial intermediary

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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, identified five pressure points for service providers, placing people with disability at the centre of

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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 long term priorities. And then, when you make this particular sequence of events, please take into

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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 non-profit, 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 re-forecast 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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