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This article addresses the question of to what extent changes in legislation and regulatory standards in aged care and disability create new expectations of these boards and directors.

This article examines what might be learnt from both literatures and considers what findings might – and might not – be hypothesised to be transferable to the governance of disability service providers.

It has been reported that complaints relating to registered health practitioners increased over the 2021/2022 financial year. Further (and separately), in aged care, there was a total of 2,767 complaints made in the first quarter of 2022 and 2,642 complaints in the second quarter. Both these figures had also trended upwards compared with the corresponding numbers in 2021 (with 2,313 in the first quarter of 2021 and 2,261 in the second quarter).

Join Consumer Health Forum (CHF) CEO, Leanne Wells, Senior Advocate for the Council for Intellectual Disability, Jim Simpson, and Chief Executive of COTA Australia, Ian Yates to discuss the active and growing role of consumers within our health, aged care and disability sectors.

The concept of ‘burnout’ was first described in the early 1970s, and has attracted media attention in recent years specifically in the context of healthcare. It is known to be particularly prevalent within certain demographics, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Burnout is not unique to acute health services, with evidence of its prevalence seen in other care sectors such as aged care and disability.

Unlike clinical governance, there is no national framework for social care governance in Australia, nor definition. The Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE) of the UK (Northern Ireland) has described the requirements of social care governance as follows (emphasis added): 

There is no formula to clinical governance. While there are key components that should always be considered, how we consider them requires flexibility and agility to achieve good clinical outcomes.

Last week (on 15 November 2021) new NDIS Practice Standards (Standards) came into force in relation to severe dysphagia. Under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Provider Registration and Practice Standards) Rules 2018 (Cth), the Standards specify minimum requirements regarding the quality of supports and services to be provided by registered NDIS providers (Providers).

Clinical governance (the concept of which emerged in the 1990s in the context of health care) has traditionally attracted less attention in the care of people living with a disability, with a noticeable dearth of research specific to this sector. Such oversight has been highlighted in the recent draft report by the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (Disability Royal Commission), which inquired into the Federal Government's approach to the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines to disability care residents and workers.

Primary and community care are fundamental to population health. They support the community’s physical and mental well-being through their role in health promotion, health literacy and preventative care, as well as in the early intervention and ongoing management of acute and chronic conditions, including end-of-life care