Aged care a rewarding challenge, says Baylis

After six months as executive manager for clinical governance and operational excellence at South Australian aged care provider Resthaven, nurse and clinical educator Merridy Baylis has told Australian Ageing Agenda she is enjoying the role and all its challenges.

“Thankfully I like to be busy. I’m enjoying it very much. It has been a steep learning curve; however I love a challenge, and I am learning a lot, and I’m well supported by the other execs and Darren [Birbeck] the CEO,” Ms Baylis told AAA.

Ms Baylis was appointed to her current position last December, after joining Resthaven in April 2020 as senior manager of clinical services. It was the first time she’d worked in the sector and it reinforced a number of thoughts about it. This includes how unique and diverse aged care is in the nursing profession, and that there is a great deal of opportunity in the sector, but that it is not for those who “are not up for a challenge.”

Coming from an intensive care and acute care nursing background, where “generally the aim is to fix people, or find the part of the body that has failed, with the aim of helping people get well,” Ms Baylis said there was still a lot of work to do to help families prepare for moving loved ones into aged care – especially in regard to advanced care planning.

She also noted there is a lot of work to be done to improve the transitions of older people from hospital to aged care homes, and between the emergency department and back again.

Ms Baylis said working in aged care felt “challenging” at the moment.

“With oversight of clinical governance, quality and risk, I work closely with my program leaders on clinical audit findings, quality indicator trending and policy and procedure review and development,” she told AAA.

“Consumer feedback, complaints and quality audits are in my program, along with clinical audit and reporting quality indicators for the organisation – so there is a constant cycle of risk identification, monitoring and trending to readily recognise site or organisational performance issues,” she said.

Ms Baylis said Resthaven believed in identifying opportunities for improvement, so she is often monitoring a clinical project or pilot, or working with the educators to ensure that staff are across any changes in policy, practice and mandatory training.

“We are also in the process of identifying a quality management system that we hope to have initiated by August, which we hope will help connect a lot of these moving parts,” she told AAA.

“In the past five years of being in aged care, it has been a continuous roller coaster of change and does not look like slowing down any time soon, so there will always be plenty more to do.”

Ms Baylis added that in this role she is able to focus on continuous improvement and evidence-based practice, highlighting Resthaven’s plans to establish onsite pharmacists, roll out a falls reduction program, and prepare the organisation for the new strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards.

“It is challenging and diverse, and I have an amazing team that I work with,” she said.

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