The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission is adding a list of permanent updates to the National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (NQIP) as of April 2023.
The Australian Government is implementing the changes early this year and all management teams of aged care facilities and nursing homes must comply with a longer list of indicators in the updated QI Program – which includes 6 new indicators.
What are the new indicators in the NQIP?
Starting 1st April 2023, you will also be required to collect and report on the following additional data indicators:
- Activities of Daily Living
- Incontinence Care
- Hospitalisation
- Workforce
- Consumer Experience
- Quality Of Life
This means that there are six more items that you need to consider when submitting your quarterly NQIP report for your aged care facility or nursing home going forward.
What do these changes mean for your organisation and your homes?
For one, this means a higher standard for aged care nationwide which will improve the experience for residents right across Australia. However, it also means:
- more data that you need to collect
- more paperwork, and
- more hours spent working on the compliance
How can your aged care organisation comply with the new NQIP quality indicators?
Compliance requirements, new data collection, and paperwork can feel overwhelming. Fortunately, most of the six new indicators (except for the Workforce indicator) can actually integrate right into your current Resident of the Day (ROD) process.
Here’s how it works:
New Indicator 1: Activities of Daily Living
The data required for the first new indicator, Activities of Daily Living, can be collected by adding the Barthel Index of Activities of Daily Living to your ROD schedule. Preferably, your aged care clinical management system can already compute the score automatically, so you don’t have to calculate it manually in Excel.
More on how, below.
New Indicator 2: Incontinence Care
Embedding the GLOBIAD – Incontinence Care assessment into your ROD schedule will take care of the data needed for Incontinence Care. We’ll explain more in the next section.
We’ll explain more in the next section.
New Indicator 3: Hospitalisation
Hospitalisation can be collected by mandating your aged care staff to complete a Clinical Risk Assessment right after a resident returns from hospital. You just need to make sure that the assessment includes questions that determine if the hospital admission was for an emergency presentation or not.
Then, adding these clinical risk assessments to your ROD process will avoid any gaps.
New Indicators 5 & 6: Consumer Experience and Quality Of Life
Both Consumer Experience and Quality Of Life indicators can integrate into your existing processes by simply sending out a customer experience survey and staff survey whenever you need to send out information to a resident’s contact person.
Their responses will provide the information you need.
As an alternative, a portable tablet and a staff member can be your on-the-spot survey tool amongst the residents to capture their insights for this indicator.
If the resident is unable to respond to these surveys, remember to collect the survey results from the resident’s proxy (remembering that these survey’s are to be offered to all residents or their proxy).
Final step: uploading this information to the Department of Health and Aged Care
Lastly, you need to submit this.
To save you time when uploading all of this additional indicator information, make sure you compile all of the data into the template provided by the Department of Health and Aged Care.
How can Acredia help you?
Our software platform’s NQIP module is designed to save your staff time collecting all of this compulsory data by featuring a digital version of Resident of the Day process and offering a seamless method to conduct Consumer Experience and Quality of Life surveys with your residents and their family members.
Contact us if you would like to know how we can save you hours of time and frustration when collecting data for the NQIP.
Who is Acredia?
Acredia provides a complete aged care software package that is easy to use and seamlessly integrates into facilities of all sizes. The Acredia platform is an innovative solution that helps aged care providers keep up with the ever-changing nature of Australian compliance requirements in the nursing home and aged care sector.
What are the benefits of using aged care management solutions like Acredia Care?
With the Acredia platform, you’ll be :
- saving costs
- reducing man-hours
- staying ahead of the curve
Our long-standing clients who have been using our software to manage their aged care facilities are now confident that they are fully equipped when these 2023 changes are implemented and are looking forward to meeting the new guidelines easily with Acredia.
“Compliance is always on our mind,” Barry Johnson, General Manager of Quality & Innovation for Signature Care says, “so, it’s great that Acredia Care is always proactive with these government updates. Now, all we have to do is adopt the system and share it with the team – then Acredia Care does the rest for us.”
Acredia is constantly updating the software platform to keep compliance simple for your aged care facility, today and long into the future.
