industry & reform
Growing pains
The challenges of growth in
the home care market.
By Peter Longman
F
or many years now, the UK has had
to adapt to an increasingly under-
funded home care market, which
has led to ever tighter eligibility criteria for
people to be entitled to state-funded care
and increasingly shorter episodes of care –
an average home care visit now is less than
30 minutes in duration.
The funding squeeze has forced many
providers out of business, and the not-
for-profit sector with historically higher
overheads has been hit particularly hard.
In Australia, meanwhile, the number of
home care providers has exploded since
2016, with 902 approved providers as of
31 December 2018 (according to the Home
Care Packages Program Data Report).
What I’ve found working here and in
the UK is that while Australia’s home care
market is vastly different to that of the UK,
some of the challenges around quality
assurance, relationship management and
speed of delivery are the same.
Most providers have to overcome
industry challenges such as:
• High employee turnover
• Poor employee engagement
• Capability gaps and misalignment
in skills and competencies
14 agedcareinsite.com.au
• Casualisation of the workforce and the
difficulty of attracting talent
• Ineffective recruitment, induction and
on-boarding processes
• Suboptimal workforce planning
• The challenge of meeting the Aged
Care Quality Standards, i.e. being more
accountable for safety and quality and
having an increased focus on client care
and client choice.
We recently undertook a snapshot survey
of the operational challenges facing
home care providers in Australia’s rapidly
changing market, with a view to assessing
which of their growth challenges were
most pressing.
Most of the providers who responded
to us were growing at a moderate pace,
with a sizeable percentage growing fast.
They told us recruitment remained a big
challenge, on a par with staff management.
For a majority of home care providers, the
most critical component was hiring staff
with the right attitude and being able to get
the right care worker to the right client on
time as often as possible.
Rostering staff time effectively was
recognised as another key challenge,
as was adapting to funding changes,
with regulation and compliance another
shared concern.
In terms of ambition, most of the
providers in our survey were focused on
improving the quality of their services but
only a few of these considered technology
to be an important part of their concerns.
In our opinion, providers’ view of the role
of technology was not completely realistic.
It did not align with the challenges they
were facing in terms of growth.
My experience in the UK has shown me
that process improvements – delivered
through technology – can also increase
home care providers’ speed of operation
and communication, and so help them
deliver a more reliable service.
Today, providers can actually automate
all of the administrative functions
involved in home care, from scheduling
and rostering to billing and payments,
and move them from paper or Excel to
intelligent cloud-based systems.
These systems allow office-based
administrators and mobile caring staff to
communicate with each other, update
rosters in real time and see a wealth
of business data with each rostered
appointment (including staff qualifications,
award interpretation and client records).
Some examples of new technology that
can be considered are:
• Customer engagement – under
Consumer Directed Care we can expect
future consumers to be much more
demanding, and therefore we need to
engage and look after them digitally as
well as physically
• Plan management (for NDIS services)
• Electronic recruitment and retention
– an effective employee engagement
app/portal can be crucial to ensuring
employee satisfaction in a mostly
unsupervised and remote role.
In short, new systems make it much
easier to plan for and manage an efficient
workforce and to scale up home care
services to take on more customers.
In the UK, home care providers are
already using tools such as optimisation
engines to ensure that staff can be
allocated to client visits in the most
efficient manner possible.
Systems such as these have seen
efficiency gains of up to 30 per cent,
particularly for large providers delivering
a high volume of short visits over wide
geographical areas.
However, many providers still opt to
utilise the sophisticated and unique local
knowledge built up over many years by
experienced care coordinators. The human
versus machine debate is never a black
and white one.
I expect the newly available technology
to play an increasing role in customer
service-led home care over the next few
years, and so I believe that home care
providers here in Australia can’t afford to
stand still. ■
Peter Longman is managing director
of Ezihub. He has been developing
technology solutions for the community
health and social care markets for over
20 years.