Our Journey to Excellence at Kamo Home & Village - As it Continues

Kamo Home and Village is on the North Island overlooking Mount Parakiore

Kamo Home and Village provides residential quality care to elderly people. The importance of the success of our product offering supports the Vision of the Trust “Quality Care for Life”.

Our first step of the excellence journey was to determine which quality framework would benefit our organisation, our choice - Baldrige.  Baldrige could offer us one approach for many outcomes, it was an internationally acclaimed quality framework and we felt it was simple, understandable and a practicable common sense approach.  Baldrige was also flexible to promote methodologies that would support the criteria and it encompassed all aspects of a business (7 categories). 

Changes that we have experienced since applying the framework are simply put as becoming future focused, implementation of specific training rather than previous known training requirements, shared enthusiasm for who we work with and the purpose we are here “quality care”, increased knowledge from all areas of the organisation supported with increased networks wider than the aged care sector and a significant number of improvement implementations.

Our future focus was to incorporate sustainability for Residents, Families and Staff, we listened to what the research was telling us, balanced our financial loss to profit – even a Charitable Trust has to make a gain!  We have considered how we can ensure qualified staff - across all roles, not just clinical required qualifications and above all to uphold our positive reputation in the community.

KHV has a formal orientation process for all staff – regardless of the work area or role definition

We recognized there would be a considerable amount of training required for this journey, we have invested in membership with the NZ Business Excellence Foundation, a membership organisation that provides us with like minded organisations who are or have also travelled this journey.  We have embarked with participation in the national evaluator training and have been fortunate to have on board a Baldrige practitioner who can guide and support us.  We have now undertaken our first external evaluation, following the NZ Business Excellence National Awards process.  We are happy to advise that we have been successful with a Bronze award.

The Baldrige journey is not the focus, implementing the principles and approaches of Baldrige is where it makes sense for the business IS.  Increased positive leadership has encouraged the organisation to ‘want’ to improve, we now make change for a purpose of improvement.  The data that we have gathered is now analysed and used – feedback, coaching, and improvements supporting our strategic direction and business planning.

With our new found philosophy of business improvement, our confidence has grown and we are enjoying the shared networks, taking advantage of the opportunities presented by these shared networks, such as extending oneself, being available to others and do the extra, evaluations, conferences, special projects.  We are here to share, share, share.

Staff and Residents enjoying life at Kamo Home

Some of our significant Implementations since the start of our journey have been the development of a one pager strategic plan, supported by another one page business plan highlighting key focus for the fiscal year.  We have implemented Balanced Scored card reporting with trend data and thanks to our membership with QPS Benchmarking we can analysis our performance and compare ourselves with like organisations.  Other operational practices applied have been the development of a staff ration, skill mix matrix to assess over or under staffing in relation to resident numbers, and swim lane process mapping methodology.

Where to from here for Kamo Home, we have identified our strategic focus as Growth; expansion of services to meet our Vision (Journey for Life with Care), whilst maintaining profitability; to sustain the growth and also Sustainability; to be here for future generations.  We have now achieved our first step with National Awards (NZBEF) and will continue our independent evaluation of our systems and processes.

We aim to keep it simple and share the Information so Everyone Knows

Kamo Home Improvement Procedure.  The following figure provides an overview of the Improvement cycle applied for improvements within Kamo Home.  Any corrective actions identified from the Audits completed by Ministry of Health, Retirement Village Association and Work Safe Management Practices (ACC) have the Improvement Procedure applied.

Figure 1: Performance Improvement System

Zoe Berry, General Manager and Trish MacPherson, Manager Quality, Risk and Support Services