Taking care of the elderly is a huge responsibility. When it comes to the care of the elderly ensuring that they are living in an environment where they feel connected, content and safe is a vital consideration when choosing a facility.
Aveo Group does that exceptionally well. As a leading owner, operator and manager of retirement and aged care communities, they’ve managed to build operational excellence across 90+ communities across Australia. How did they do it? By choosing to use technology to streamline processes, so teams can focus on what really matters.
Aveo Group ensures that each and every one of their 12,000 senior residents is given the opportunity to live their life to the full with iAuditor by SafetyCulture.
Aveo Group is operating in an industry that has been under tight scrutiny and pressure over the last decade in Australia, however, they have been determined to ensure their network of 90+ communities across the country are not only compliant with relevant policy and regulations but continue to uphold the level of quality and consistency of services they pride themselves on.
Historically, audits and inspections were conducted on paper-based forms or complicated spreadsheet templates. Inevitably, this resulted in a duplication of effort; with results recorded on forms only to then be passed to another person to log in to a central register.
They knew there had to be a better way.
"We needed a tool that would standardize the approach to conducting inspections, afford control over master templates, could set audit schedules and issue reminders, and provide a real-time view of compliance data aggregated at a whole of company level. The latter was particularly important, as it affords management the opportunity to identify systemic issues requiring a whole of organization response, or alternatively, specific areas or work locations where further investment or training is needed," said Joshua Little, Chief Risk Officer, Aveo Group.
Aveo set about finding a new solution to empower teams, and aftermarket research and a few trials they landed on the iAuditor platform for three reasons: its simplicity, ease of access, and ability to leverage analytics.
"It provides insight into an organization’s safety culture and commitment to comply. It’s not just failure rates or audit observations that prove useful to management; one can often get an indication of culture and attitudes around safety and compliance by way of on-time completion rates and the suitability and sufficiency of data being captured," said Little.
"It’s one thing to find the right solution, but operations management platforms like iAuditor are ineffective without teams that are motivated to use them every day.
"Like most technology platforms, iAuditor is people-driven. It becomes more powerful the more proficient the programme administrators are. This has a trickle-down effect across the organisation, helping teams act on issues and opportunities every day – and helping the business analyze trends in real-time and drive daily improvements along the way," Little explained.
To kick things off, Aveo set up small working groups to partner with their SafetyCulture Success Team to formulate a pragmatic roll-out plan. They appointed various “Champions” throughout the business and made them responsible for their respective divisions. This approach allowed them to create a tailor-made experience for each team. They also set up an iAuditor resource centre on their company’s intranet using plain language and graphics to orientate users. This made the process of completing an audit simple to grasp, no matter the user.
As time went on, it became apparent to the business that iAuditor helped teams deliver streamlined, innovative, real-time assessment and reporting. This lead to the adoption of the platform to grow and grow – from 6 users to more than 400.
What started with a small team visiting communities and conducting operational audits became hundreds of users performing:
- work health & safety inspections
- property inspections and facility audits
- clinical audits and care review
- privacy compliance
- business continuity planning checklist internal audits
And their most common use cases? Food safety audits for in-house Select Dining and workplace self-assessments. Far more than just a traditional audit solution, for Aveo Group, beyond the traditional audit solution, different business units started using iAuditor to conduct internal surveys, standardise project control group meeting agendas, develop comprehensive testing programmes for deep-dive audit engagements and facilitate Sarbanes Oxley 404 testing.
Responding to a pandemic with iAuditor was something that Aveo looked at in the early days of the pandemic. To be able to respond with agility and speed in the design, promulgation, performance, and collation of audit results. This helped them oversee infection prevention and control activities, outbreak management readiness, and PPE competency.
"This information was invaluable – and provided us with real-time compliance and performance data informing our COVID-19 response efforts. It also facilitated the provision of assurance to those charged with governance – giving Directors comfort that policies, procedures, protocols and training were being rolled out and implemented as intended," said Little.
