Maximising Your Benchmarking Experience Through Staff Communication

The Ausindustry definition of benchmarking states that benchmarking is "An ongoing systematic process to search for and introduce best practice into your organisation...............and that is it conducted in such a way that all parts of your organisation understand and achieve their full potential." There is no doubt that organisations that consistently engage staff in the review of results and actively seek input and feedback extract greater value out of their benchmarking experience. Time and time again, QPS has noted that many of the great improvements being made by facilities involve high levels of staff participation.

The Whiddon Group - Largs is a facility in NSW and is located just west of Newcastle in the Hunter Valley. It has been benchmarking with QPS Benchmarking for10 years. The Director of Care, Carolyn Tranter has been managing the facility since 2003 and has contributed to previous newsletter articles on medications management and resident / relative satisfaction. In terms of high level outcomes, Largs has very strong resident, relative and employee satisfaction levels, a good labour to income ratio and a very well developed culture for the self reporting of medication errors.

Carolyn believes that the staff members at The Whiddon Group - Largs are actively engaged and interested in the benchmarking results but also contends that keeping staff engaged is an ongoing management process. "The benchmarking results have to be explained both verbally and via more formal mechanisms such as newsletters and notice boards" explains Carolyn "and it needs to be repeated from time to time to keep pace with staff turnover and the simple fact that staff members will prioritise their focus on daily issues if benchmarking outcomes are not promoted periodically".

Simply publishing the results is not enough to secure staff engagement. Providing value added comments, praising staff for the efforts, or suggesting opportunities for improvement is also necessary for both verbal and documented feedback, and these are some of the principles that The Whiddon Group - Largs has incorporated into its Quality News Updates. These are done quarterly and distributed at the same time as pays so that each member has a personal copy.

The April edition of the Larg's Lodge Quality News Update has been reprinted to show how Carolyn Tranter and her team use the QPS Benchmarking scorecards to help identify both strengths and opportunities for improvement.

QUALITY NEWS UPDATE APRIL 2010 for TWG LARGS

Why do we collect data, do surveys and conduct audits, staff ask? Well, we collect this information for the following reasons:

• its a way of collecting data and information that shows what we are doing well and what we could improve;
• helps us to evaluate our improvements when we make changes otherwise how do we know it worked or not;
• forms part of the evidence that we show assessors from the accreditation agency when they visit us so that they can see we are complying with the standards and outcomes;
• helps tailor education and training for the staff;
• its a bit like a jigsaw puzzle which when we put them together it gives us a big picture of how well we are going;
• helps us plan for where we want to go in the future - "our strategic plan"; and,
• to tell the public and those in the industry about our high standards and quality service we provide.

Across the organisation we collect information each 3 months and submit it to a service called Quality Performance Service or QPS for short. They filter the data then put it into graphs that show us our own results plus how we compare to other facilities (not only our own) within Australia and New Zealand. So if someone was doing really well we may like to contact them and ask them to share their information so that we could perhaps put them into practice here.

The following graphs are the results of the 4 recent surveys that we did in the last quarter January to March 2010. A comment is given underneath it to give a bit more information and interpret the results.

General Aged Care Competency Test

Employee Satisfaction

Clinical Record Audit

Food Safety Numerical Profile

As you can see from the 4 graphs above, overall we are doing well but there are some areas that staff need to improve on such as knowing what our mission statement is and 4 standards of accreditation are; improving their documentation by ensuring they put the required information in the clients record and making sure that the food safety plan is followed strictly. We have had a few new staff members join us recently so take the time to view the mission statement located on the wall in the foyer and standards of accreditation on the CQI board in the carer's room.