Purpose
Wendy’s Home Care (WHC) is committed to the health, safety and well-being of its clients and employees and to the continuous improvement of the organisation’s governing and operating systems. WHC endeavours to create and implement effective systems that support the day to day needs of our clients and employees.
As a trusted provider of home care services, we aim to ensure we are compliant with legal, regulatory and contractual requirements while also meeting the expectations of the individuals and families who trust us to provide their home care services.
The purpose of this policy is to provide the foundation for a transparent and coordinated approach to our overall Incident Management System.
This policy aims;
- to ensure that incidents are identified, assessed, recorded, managed, resolved and reported,
- to ensure follow up actions are taken to address immediate needs and to minimise harm,
- to ensure that the lessons learned from incidents are used to drive improvement across our services and systems,
- to ensure that our system is compliant with our regulatory and reporting requirements,
- to ensure that WHC employees understand their Incident Management responsibilities as workers, and
- to ensure that WHC clients, their carers, family, friends and others understand their roles in assisting us with Incident Management and in the safe provision of their services and safe provision of workplaces for our employees.
Scope
All stakeholders can be impacted by incidents. Impacted parties of an incident may be;
- a client/s of WHC,
- an employee/s of WHC, or
- WHC, as an organisation.
For the purpose of this policy, an incident is;
- an act, omission, event or circumstance that has caused harm, that could have caused harm, or that has the potential to cause harm, and
- has occurred in connection with the provision of services or throughout the course of employment or throughout the course of business operations and includes incidents where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that there may be a connection between the incident and the provision of services, employment or business operations.
Policy Statements
WHC is committed to maintaining a documented Incident Management System that contains procedures for identifying, assessing, managing, resolving and reporting incidents.
These procedures specify who incidents must be reported to and how people who are impacted by incidents are supported and involved in resolving the incident.
Procedures also specify when an investigation into an incident is necessary. Throughout the investigation of an incident, Wendy’s Home Care is committed to ensuring that principles of procedural fairness are applied.
We require that the views of the person impacted by the incident be considered when assessing the following;
- whether the incident could have been prevented;
- how well the incident was managed and resolved;
- what, if any, remedial action needs to be undertaken to prevent further similar incidents from occurring, or to minimise their impact;
- whether other persons or bodies need to be notified of the incident.
WHC is committed to communicating to all relevant parties, information about how the system operates, and who is responsible for particular actions and processes.
To promote transparency, WHC ensures that it’s Incident Management System is accessible to all stakeholders by providing a summary of the system on our website, in our Client Information Folders and in our Staff Handbook. We will provide a full copy of our documented Incident Management System upon request and in a format that is accessible to the individual requesting it.
WHC Incident Management System provides for the collection of statistical and other information relating to incidents to enable us to;
- review issues raised by the occurrence of incidents; and
- identify and address systemic issues; and
- report information relating to incidents.
WHC Incident Management System sets out the roles and responsibilities of all of its employees in identifying, assessing, managing and resolving incidents. All WHC employees are required to be trained in the use of and compliance with, our Incident Management System.
Policy Owner & Key Responsibilities
The policy owner is the General Manager. The General Manager has overall responsibility for the management of legal compliance obligations and overall responsibility for ensuring WHC fulfils its legal obligations and effectively manages any risk exposure that may result from compliance failures. The General Manager has overall responsibility for providing formal assurance as to the state of compliance of WHC.
The Quality & Compliance Manager is responsible for implementing this policy, internal reporting on the outcomes and effectiveness of this policy, and for maintaining the currency of this policy.
The General Manager – or in her absence the Operations Manager (client impacting incidents) or the Quality & Compliance Manager (employee impacting incidents), is responsible for reporting incidents to external authorities when the circumstances require such action. The General Manager, the Operations Manager and the Quality & Compliance Manager will work in consultation with each other to assess if an incident is reportable to an external authority.
The Quality & Compliance Manager is responsible for investigating incidents or delegating the investigation of incidents to another internal or external party.
Consultation & Approval
Employees and clients of Wendy’s Home Care were consulted in the development of this policy. This policy has been approved by the General Manager