Ensuring staff wellbeing key to implementing enabling approaches: advisor

For aged care organisations to effectively deliver the active ageing approaches now expected under the reforms, they must first ensure the wellbeing of staff, a sector advisor says.

Since 1 July, community care providers are now expected to increasingly adopt a wellness approach in service delivery across both home support and home care. While some parts of the sector have been pursuing enabling approaches in recent years, for many providers this new requirement will represent a significant challenge.

In order to deliver the active ageing approaches it is essential that aged care providers ensure a focus on staff wellness runs throughout their organisation, according to Marisa Galiazzo of Green Sea Shell Consulting.

“How can we expect providers to be aligned with the wellness mandate that has come from the Commonwealth if they don’t sort themselves out in-house first?” she said.

Ms Galiazzo was speaking ahead of her participation in the Active Ageing Conference 2015, a one-day event being hosted by Australian Ageing Agenda and Community Care Review to support organisations in implementing the wellness, reablement and restorative care approaches. (Access the conference website here).

She said that frontline care workers were the face and brand of an organisation and, in order for them to effectively educate clients about active ageing, it was essential that their own health and wellbeing was supported by organisational wellness initiatives.

“It’s about ensuring the messages around the approach to wellness are embedded upstream in the client service model, the marketing and communications strategy, so that downstream it comes out in frontline staff who are the brand advocates, through the language they use with clients.”

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010 highlighted the imperative for workplace wellness in Australia, and found evidence of the return on investment in wellness initiatives for staff, she said.

“Self-care of employees in the organisation across all the areas of health we talk about with clients – psychological, physical, mental and spiritual – is crucial,” Ms Galiazzo said, adding that staff wellness initiatives often came from simple ideas, such as incentives to stop smoking and activity clubs.

She pointed to companies like Apple and Google, which were attractive to young workers because they had incentives to help employees, whether it was gym programs, community gardens like those run by Qantas, or walking clubs. “For those employers, the number one priority is their staff, because if you don’t look after your staff, you don’t have a workforce to look after your clients,” she said.

Organisational ‘fitness’ will aid reform response

Ensuring staff health and wellbeing would ultimately feed into an organisation’s overall fitness, which would enable it to be flexible and agile and respond quicker to the changing policy landscape, she said.

While several large organisations reported being “change weary” and overwhelmed by the reforms to the sector, it was essential they remained competitive as aged care moved to a deregulated environment with many new nimble players, she said.

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The Active Ageing Conference 2015 takes place on 29 October at the Amora Hotel, Sydney. Visit the conference website to access the full program and register