Taking care of the elderly is a challenging yet highly rewarding profession – as you already know. Ensuring that the services available to the residents in your retirement village are of the highest standards is at the core of your responsibilities and requires you to constantly seek new, innovative ways of improving their living environment.
With a million and one things that require your attention on a daily basis, it can be tough to find the time to think out of the box. By ensuring that your aged care standards always meet the set requirements, you can free up time to plan ahead and improve the delivery of services in your village. Ensuring that the living conditions in your village adhere to the International Retirement Community Accreditation Scheme (IRCAS) is your first port of call to ensuring the best aged care standards. IRCAS sets out various requirements that provide an outline for quality and risk management to ensure that Australian retirement living standards are internationally compliant.
Here are some of the top aged care standards set out by IRCAS to help ensure the best possible living conditions in your retirement village:1. Quality Management
The quality of services, property and facilities are all paramount in ensuring your aged care standards are met. While IRCAS has no prescribed approach to quality management, it does suggest that quality measures be implemented to suit the size, structure and environment of the village in your care. You can ensure that the quality management of services and property in the village are seen to by continuously monitoring the quality of services delivered in the village (or by outside contractors); pinpointing areas where improvements can be made; implementing the necessary improvements, and then assessing the efficiency of the improvements made.2. Services & Facilities
Ensuring that aged care standards are met, relies on meeting the specific needs of residents in your village. This can be done by providing additional services such as domestic support which includes laundry and transport services; personal care for residents in the frail care department such as washing and grooming, and medical services that includes medication and clinical procedures. While services aren’t compulsory, they do increase the quality of your village’s aged care standards. It is also of critical importance then that these facilities are well-maintained and their performance monitored to reduce any possible risk to the residents making use of the services and facilities, and increase their efficacy. This can be done by employing a dedicated building maintenance services provider.3. Safety & Security
As with any business, the safety of residents and employees is also at the core of the success of your retirement village. And it’s only through the implementation of robust occupational health and safety measures that you can ensure the highest levels of aged care standards in your village. Workplace health and safety relies heavily on the maintenance and promotion of the wellbeing of residents, employees as well as any contractors working on the village premises. Preventing risks and protecting property through thorough maintenance is one of the defining the factors of workplace safety. It is your responsibility to ensure that measures – suited to unique needs of your own village – are in place to help implement and maintain good work health and safety standards.4. Environmental Sustainability
The increasing global awareness of society’s impact on the environment is filtrating through all industries and changing the way in which we approach daily tasks and business processes. It should be no different in your retirement village. Not only are eco-friendly measures a way to cut down on operational costs, they also allow for a more sustainable and safe living and working environment. Therefore, the management of natural resources in your village should be optimised. This can be done through the implementation of plans and processes that reduce environmental impact. You can further bolster your green efforts by opting for products and service providers that meet the required environmental sustainability requirements.5. Innovation
Innovation is key to ensuring the sustainability of business processes in your village. In an ever changing environment, the efficacy of operations and processes also needs to be adapted – something that can only be done through innovation. New ideas can potentially improve the living conditions of residents, services provided to them as well as employee procedures. Innovation is the driver of industry improvement and competitiveness and is driven by vision, research, planning and resourcing.
Higgins Coatings is dedicated to ensuring that we adhere to the highest industry standards to provide quality building maintenance services in the delicate retirement village environment. We are triple certified to not only ensure the safety of our own employees, but more importantly, safeguard the residents in areas we work in.
Image credit: South Port Uniting