industry & reform
Can you run me through what you see
as the Whiddon Way?
The Whiddon Way
actually a privilege. It’s a once in a lifetime
opportunity to be able to contribute to
the royal commission and particularly in a
constructive and positive way, the way that
Whiddon were asked to, and what we were
asked to present on.
Is person-centred care
viable in aged care?
Chris Mamarelis interviewed
by Conor Burke
W
hiddon is a large not-for‑profit
organisation that operates
residential aged care,
community care and retirement living,
with 19 facilities scattered throughout
NSW and parts of Queensland.
Whiddon has been a proponent of
the person-centred care model since
2015. Its chief executive Chris Mamarelis
was recently called to talk to the royal
commission as one of the top 100
providers required to appear.
Aged Care Insite spoke with Mamarelis
shortly after his appearance. Below is an
edited extract of the conversation.
ACI: How did you find the whole royal
commission experience?
CM: The royal commission itself was a
pretty good opportunity. I’ve said to a
few people that when the dust settles
and you look back, you realise that it’s
18 agedcareinsite.com.au
That week focused on person-centred
care. In 2015, Whiddon changed focus
and rebranded three years later to
reflect the shift to a person-centred
approach. What spurred the change at
that time?
Interestingly, the commissioners asked
me the same question there. As an
organisation, we’d gone through some
renewal back at that point in time with a
management team and as an organisation.
When that process occurs, you start
looking at where your focus is and where
your focus should be.
So as any organisation does, we went
through a strategic planning process and,
working with the board, we really wanted
to emphasise that as an organisation,
central to everything we do are the people
we care for.
We built a framework, which at the top
of that had a statement about enriching
the people we care for. From that, we
had to deliver and build a whole heap of
initiatives and really reinvent ourselves as
an organisation.
From a care perspective and a resident-
inclined perspective, that’s where this
whole move to refining our approach to
care – to have this positive impact we
wanted to have – was born.
Well, I guess there are three components
of what has occurred. The Whiddon Way
is really the cultural change that is required
to support this shift and this approach to
care and the approach to the person, the
resident, the client that we are taking. And
obviously, in order to have that positive
impact, we have to empower the people
within the organisation to do that.
Culture is the most significant space that
we have to have an impact on. So, we did
a lot of work to influence cultural change,
and the Whiddon Way is the way that we
express ourselves and express our culture.
At the heart of the Whiddon Way
is nurturing relationships. And those
relationships can be predominantly
between our team members, employees
and those that we care for, but they
extend to the community, they extend
to other stakeholders. And relationships
are then central to the Whiddon Way, the
way we function and the way we nurture
our culture.
The Whiddon Way is also about
creating impact, and it’s about being
progressive and innovative. It’s about,
as an organisation, giving licence to
our employees to go on this journey
with MyLife, our model of care and
relationship‑based care. And culturally,
from the top down, we obviously have to
be giving this licence to people if we’re
going to facilitate this cultural shift.
You use that word ‘culture’, and I think
that throughout the royal commission
we’ve seen that a lot of the instances
of poor care are tied to poor culture
among the workforce. But I think
culture is a very top down thing.
How did you personally implement
culture change?
Well, I couldn’t agree with you more that –
the tone is set at the top, 100 per cent. And
that’s from the board and as CEO, and then
it filters through the organisation. I think we
see that in good organisations and we see
where problems arise.
I said to the commissioners, in my role as
CEO, I’m responsible for every resident that
we care for in an aged care setting: every
client in home care and every resident in a
retirement village.
The messaging and how we
communicate through the organisation,
again, if it’s about giving licence to the
people, they have to hear it from the
board and from the CEO that this is the