Pathways to Better Living Pty Ltd – Continuous Improvement Policy
Introduction
Continuous improvement helps to ensure supports and services are provided are always the best possible for participants. Part of quality management, continuous improvement involves:
- Listening to participants and valuing their feedback
- Understanding what we are doing well
- Identifying where improvements are needed
- Taking action in order to best meet the needs of participants
- Applies to all areas of the service at all times
- Applies to all representatives including key management personnel, directors, full time workers, part time workers, casual workers, contractors and volunteers
Continuous improvement
- Regularly collect information, from a variety of sources, including:
- Things that are working well
- Things that are not working well
- Things that have gone wrong
- Decide if the issue was a risk
- Any changes in requirements
- Any external knowledge or advice
- Record issues and ideas in a continuous improvement plan
- Decide if an issue presents a risk – if it is, record in the risk management plan, and work with those affected to address on ideas for change
- Implement changes as agreed and documented
- Advise all relevant stakeholders of any changes made
- Monitor changes and review if intended outcomes are positive, whether there are any unintended negative impacts and any further changes required to address this
- Report regularly to key management personnel on continuous improvement plans and the progress
Continuous improvement responsibilities of key management personnel
- Drive quality improvement, and encourage and provide opportunities for worker involvement
- Ensuring services are well planned, effective in meeting needs and provided at the best possible level of quality by:
- Ensuring a quality management system is used and that internal controls are in place to comply with relevant standards
- Monitoring the results of quality reviews and making changes as needed
- Ensuring compliance with reporting requirements
- Implementing risk management
- Pursuing organisational goals of service excellence
Additionally, key management personnel should provide leadership in quality management including:
- Foster a positive attitude to quality improvement among workers
- Implement policy and procedures for quality management to guide workers
- Identify key indicators for quality for the service
- Establish documentation and reporting processes to enable the ongoing tracking of quality improvement
Continuous improvement responsibilities of workers
- Constantly be on the lookout for ways that processes or services could be improved
- Discuss any identified areas for improvement with supervisor
- Participate in team meeting about continuous improvement
