Service management
Your best-practice home healthcare provider
Access Homehealth, one of New Zealand' s largest home health care providers, delivers regionally-based specialised nursing services, personal care and domestic assistance nationwide. We are recognised industry leaders at the forefront of change and standards development.
Our services integrate cultural sensitivity and understanding, partnership with stakeholder groups, quality management, risk minimisation, support for clients in the home, robust training systems, documentation and feedback, reporting, monitoring and project management.
Supporting your organisation as well as your service users
We look afteryour needs by building our service around a sound understanding of the risks, service requirements and accountabilities associated with this specialised area of primarily publicly funded and accountable home healthcare.
Nationwide
Our network of registered and enrolled nursing coordinators manages home healthcare support workers in five regions. We have the expertise to become your eyes, ears and hands in the home, ensuring your patients receive cost-effective, best-practice support in an environment of minimised risk.
Partnership
Relationship and account management - how we deliver
Partnership is one of Access Homehealth' s core values. We make it easy to do business with us by taking a partnership approach to clients, communities, those we contract to, and our own staff.
Initial Care Plan
A cornerstone of our service delivery is the Initial Care Plan. During this process, which builds upon your needs assessment, a qualified and experienced coordinator assesses the client' s physical health requirements, along with cultural, spiritual, social, mental and emotional considerations. These translate into a Care Plan designed to ensure that service and care are effective, efficient, individualised and appropriate. The Plan also enables us to determine how we will organise our client services, staff delegation, and daily activities.
Each client can choose to have an advocate present during the initial admission to provide support.
Alerting you to issues
We provide ongoing supervision and monitoring during our service delivery, with coordinators regularly visiting clients to review the standards of care and look for smouldering issues. We have prescribed escalation processes in place, with guidelines to determine the urgency and impact of any incidents that occur. We operate a formal reporting process for referring agencies both at an aggregate level and for individual clients. If our monitoring indicates that a client needs additional or specialised services, we will notify the referring coordinator, and arrange for this care to be provided.
Stakeholder networks
We enjoy national and regional partnerships with a wide range of stakeholder groups. We have excellent links with disability advocacy groups and strong cultural relationships. Our links with Rural Women New Zealand (formerly Women' s Division of Federated Farmers) allow us entry into tightly-knit communities that form the backbone of New Zealand society. Cultural understanding
Maori, Pacific Island and other cultural contexts
Cultural diversity, and the central role played by the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of our society, are among the most important tenets in New Zealand healthcare today. When healthcare is provided in the client' s home, it becomes imperative that the provider not only understands the principles of culturally appropriate support, but also delivers this support in partnership with the client' s wider community and family.
Access Homehealth' s Maori Health Plan integrates the Treaty of Waitangi and partnership with Maori into the delivery of home health services on a daily basis. Our training, key performance indicators, quality systems and recruitment processes are all informed by the principles of the Treaty, and respect for the social, economic, political, cultural and spiritual values of Maori.
We have memoranda of understanding with Maori communities, health care providers or runanga in each region and we are developing similar relationships with New Zealand' s Pacific Island communities.
Accountability
Quality and risk management
Risk mitigation is built into Access Homehealth' s service delivery and support processes, and is one of the major differentiators between our organisation and other home healthcare providers. We have a wide range of proactive monitoring and reporting processes, including our monitoring of clients, Worksafe and Hazard Management plans for employees, the risk and hazard management modules of our training, occupational safety and health procedures, incident reporting and complaints procedures, privacy, referral processes, external and internal service indicators, and compliance with policies, regulations and contract requirements.
On the other side of the coin, our quality management systems provide assurance that the standard of care is consistently high and constantly improving. We achieve this through independently audited national and regional quality plans. Our quality assurance is built on the Health and Disability Sector and the Home and Community Support Sector Standards, which set the required benchmarks for home healthcare services and which we were actively involved in developing.
We review our performance improvement initiatives continuously.
People and performance
Recruitment, training, health and safety
Staff must be nurtured if they are to be an organisation' s greatest asset. Access Homehealth develops its staff through recruitment, training and performance management processes to ensure they fully understand our standards and values.
We also take cultural context into account during our recruiting process, ensuring that at least one member of the selection panel is from the same cultural background as the applicant. All applicants are thoroughly security checked at regional manager level.
Training
In keeping with best practice performance management and the Nurses' Organisation' s registration maintenance requirements for nurses, Access Homehealth has developed a significant industry training capability. We have developed a unique training system for support workers, nursing coordinators and regional managers, working closely with organisations such as the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We have appointed a national training committee and have training coordinators in each of our regions. Our chief executive sits on several industry workforce development committees.
Our in-house training programme revolves around a compulsory six-week induction programme for all staff. Our coordinators, who must have a recognised health qualification, can join our subsidised professional development programme, enabling them to diversify into a wide range of specialised services.
Our training is available to case managers from referring agencies such as District Health Boards, ACC and GPs' practices. We can also tailor our training to referring agents working towards joint outreach contracts with us.
A credible organisation
Access Homehealth is a $25 million-a-year business supporting 4500 staff and delivering services throughout New Zealand via a regional and branch network. You can be confident that when you contract home healthcare to us, you are partnering with one of the most robust organisations in the healthcare industry.
Technology
Our scale of operation enables us to invest in the future of home healthcare. For instance, we have pioneered some significant technological innovations, including an online reference tool for all policies and procedures addressing ethics, standards, governance, infection control, clinical pathways, risk management, human resources, service management, quality management, information management, training, Government health strategies, our Maori Health Plan and ethnicity awareness. We are automating many other business processes and formally build and manage our knowledge of new medical technologies. |
