Stronger Together

The COVID 19 crisis has disrupted life as we know it and put an unprecedented spotlight on businesses and services. Being agile and willing to adapt to a new vision has helped many entities survive during this challenging time and those who recognised that joining forces with like-minded entities, being stronger together, was their path to survival and resilience.

That strength has allowed them to adapt the nature of their delivery services and cater to the needs of their clients, which have changed. It’s comforting to see that many of us in our sector have risen to the pandemic challenge and performed well.

While not denying the sadness and hardship this virus has created, I can’t help but feel its legacy could prove to be a positive game-changer in the aged care and disability sector. What we have been seeing during this time, is that some service providers are struggling because their traditional practices and services are unworkable under this pandemic pressure.  It has shaken up the industry and made us all assess the way we do things, our services and the changing needs of our clients and their carers. Equally, the fragmentation of our sector resulted in service inequity. Some clients were over-serviced with response tactics such as check-in calls from 8 different agencies a day, while others were underserviced.

What’s clear is the need for providers to join together to deliver cross-services they never considered they could deliver before. It’s imperative we keep pace with the changing needs of our clients and their different expectations about receiving services – and different services.

It’s important to recognise quickly that if you are unprepared and lacking financial and staffing resources to be able to cater to these changing needs, that the answer is to join forces with another entity who can allow you to change your business and respond quickly. If you can’t meet the enormous costs of change, then collaboration or merging with another entity is the only way to respond.

One of the other challenges we are facing is that mental health issues have sadly reached crisis levels, arising from isolation, loss of income, despair and restrictions of services. We are also seeing increased mental health issues among providers, caused by fatigue, trauma and pressure to deliver where resources don’t exist.

While providers have had to adapt, some are struggling to keep step with the pace of change because they don’t have the structure, resources, staffing levels, budgets or specialist expertise available. That is understandable – none of us saw a global pandemic in our future.  In some cases, services, infrastructure and processes have been revealed as inefficient, costly to the bottom line, unworkable, even unresponsive and this is clearly unacceptable, because no provider wants to fail their clients, who always deserve a better outcome.

So, what does this mean? The pandemic has highlighted the need for providers to work together. That providers of aged care services need to adapt and evolve as we are called upon to deliver services differently and deliver new services to cater to needs that we never thought of before.

It tells us that the prognosis can be better and you can be stronger by working with other providers, amalgamating your organisation to become fit-for-purpose, even agile in uncertainty, to meet the emerging expectations of clients and government, post-pandemic.

Let’s look at how we adapted at Your Side during this challenging time and worked with other providers to help us deliver a better service.

We partnered with The Benevolent Society in the Carer Gateway Program, a free Government national carer hub which provides reliable services, support and advice specifically for carers. The Your Side partnership allowed the delivery of these services to carers within our catchment area and demonstrated a win-win collaboration for both entities.

Before social distancing was introduced, we realised that we needed to come up with a solution to connect people in the community with isolated elders at home. We introduced the postcard project, which encouraged people to reach out to those in the community who needed to remain connected. After it was promoted in the local paper and we received 250+ applications overnight, we realised that Your Side couldn’t handle the demand and process on our own. We reached out to other organisations to help us better deliver this service and drew them together, including five local Councils and other MAC service delivery organisations.

It was a lesson for all of us as we experienced the benefits of collaboration and working together – not least of which is the opportunity to scale this project into a much larger program that continues beyond the pandemic. If we had taken the view of keeping the project in-house, our reach would have been limited and the positive impacts of the project restricted.

Vulnerable people miss out when we don’t work together, when we don’t work to our respective strengths and try to duplicate service, organisation by organisation. Is that what we want for our sector?

A lesson as we emerge from this pandemic into a new climate of uncertainty, is that we all have to ask ourselves, as service providers, whether our organisation can quickly pivot and scale?  Are we up to the task of this change? Can our staff deal with the changes and what impact will that have on the organisation’s culture? Quite simply, does your organisation have the energy?

To me, the answer has been revealed. We can be much stronger together, better equipped to find the answers and deliver better services through collaboration and collectives. To focus on the dignity of older Australians and people with disability and put people before process. To provide unprecedented levels of support for the unsung heroes – the millions of family members and friends providing care in Australia.

This can all be achieved if we park our egos, fears and concerns and join together to pool our intellect and experience and become financially stronger entities who can afford to change and adapt to become fit for purpose and navigate into a stronger position of excellence.