ACCPA aiming to close gap in innovation sharing

The aged care provider peak body wants to shake up innovation in aged care including from within the organisation, CEO Tom Symondson tells Australian Ageing Agenda.

Aged & Community Care Providers Association is aiming to encourage a capable and innovative sector with continuous improvement at its heart. This is the third pillar of the organisation’s four-pillar strategy, which ACCPA chief executive officer Tom Symondson shared with delegates at the peak’s Queensland state conference in April.

Incorporating it as one of the four pillars shows ACCPA is serious about innovation and continuous improvement, Mr Symondson told AAA on the sidelines of the conference.

“If we’re encouraging world best practice, we have to ingrain those things within it. Otherwise, all we’re doing is slightly fiddling around the edges and doing the best version of what we already do, rather than looking at what it could be,” he said.

And rather than a lack of innovation, Symondson said the ability to share between the many organisations and jurisdictions was the key bit missing.

“There are loads of people in our sector that are doing innovative things. But what are we doing to make sure that innovation doesn’t just die in that one site, in one town or in one state?”

The innovative practice happening within teams, units, facilities and organisations is neither well shared nor understood, he said. “There’s nothing stopping us doing that except we haven’t built the structures to make it happen.”

“We need to structure innovation into our team.”

Building those structures is on ACCPA’s agenda, said Mr Symondson. How that will look is still under consideration. It may include the continuation of existing initiatives like innovAGEING and awards programs to identify and share innovations. It may not. The learnings from them may inform the evolution of these approaches or the development of a completely new one to innovation, he said.

“We’d rather look at innovation with a bit of a blank sheet and say ‘well. what’s helpful for an association to do for its members in innovation?’ We don’t know the answer. But we’ll be focused on that.”

But one thing is certain, rather than just identifying innovation, Mr Symondson said he wanted to build the skill of innovation within ACCPA.

“We need to structure innovation into our team,” Mr Symondson told AAA. The current draft structure includes a role called head of innovation – with a decision most likely on who that is or perhaps something completely different in the next financial year.

“We are looking at whether we can appoint a head of innovation or a similar sort of role; that regardless of whether there’s government funding or not, we support as part of our cost base the identification, scaling and assessment of innovative practice.”

“We’ve done it on a small scale; maybe we can look at doing it at a bigger scale.”

The ability to scale, he said, was one advantage ACCPA had over its predecessors Leading Age Services Australia and Aged and Community Services Australia.

“We’re now big enough where we could potentially invest in that kind of role. Because I don’t want for us to say to [providers], ‘you’ve all got to be innovative, but we don’t know how to help you.’ Or we’re doing it in a very cottage industry way where we’re saying, ‘oh, that’s quite good, go and look at that project’.”

Instead, he said he wanted ACCPA to be able to actively support providers. “We might have a framework around innovation, we might be able to have design hubs where people can share innovation directly member to member, which we have not had in the past. We’ve done it … on a small scale; maybe we can look at doing it at a bigger scale.”

Keep following Australian Ageing Agenda for the latest and future in aged care innovation as we head to Adelaide on Monday and Tuesday next week for the Aged Care 2030 Beyond conference hosted Aged Care Research & Industry Innovation Australia.

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