hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar I'm Janet Anderson the commissioner of the Aged care quality and safety Commission I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we're meeting around Australia uh and paying my respects to Elders past and present and also to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are actually participating in this webinar today we're going to be talking about the serious incident response scheme or sues in home services and specifically how to report under the scheme we're also going to talk about sirs in relation to people living with cognitive impairment or dementia who are receiving uh services in the home now the parliament has just passed legislation which uh extends the sirs scheme into Home Services from the 1st of December and I'm assuming if you're watching this webinar you already know that it includes Home Care Package providers providers of short-term restorative Care at home Commonwealth home Support Program Services National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flexible aged care services multi-purpose services and transition Care Program Services now that's a long list but if you're watching this this uh this webinar you'll know where you are in that list the exposure draft of the subordinate legislation which is the detail about sures has been released and I commend it to you uh it absolutely is compulsory reading along with the draft guidelines that my commission has published they have draft on them that draft sample be removed immediately the subordinate legislation is finalized and we're expecting that to happen very shortly now this is the third webinar of in our series on tourism response scheme in Home Services the first one back in September focused on Incident Management systems and they're linked to sirs the second one in November early in November uh shown a spotlight on the eight serious incident response scheme reportable incidents and also gave the perspective of working under sirs from a residential aged care and a home services point of view uh recordings for both of those webinars is available from our website so please go there if you missed either of them today I'm very pleased to be joined by three speakers who are going to step us through the content for this webinar Catherine Jenner is a senior director in the commission uh and she's going to talk about reporting under sirs uh Jade Austin is from the Department of Health and she will be talking about the my age care portal and how reporting is done through the portal and then to round off the trio we have Leanne Emerson from dementia Australia who'll be talking to us about sirs for people with cognitive impairment or dementia who who receive services at home now there will be time at the end for the panelists to take questions uh and we did receive some pre-submitted questions thank you to all who who put questions to us beforehand there is also an opportunity for you to put questions to US during the webinar uh and any we don't get to uh we will publish in a q a form uh on our website afterwards but without further Ado let me introduce the first speaker um Catherine cleaners as I say senior director of the serious interview team in the commission and Catherine's going to give a brief recap of the eight reportable incidents under sirs and then she's going to touch on the way in which notifications are submitted Catherine thank you Janet I'm pleased to share advice from the Department of Health and aged care that the draft subordinate legislation absurds for Home Services is close to being finalized now that the consultation period has closed subordinate legislation is a form of legislation that sits under an act of Parliament and typically it includes more details about what is required to comply with the ACT once the legislative process is finalized the commission will be able to review our service for Home Services resource materials to ensure that they align with the final requirements until that time you should be reading the information in our draft guidelines on the serves for Home Services providers which is now available on our website at aged carequality.gov dot a u forward slash reforms what I'd like to do now is uh give a little bit of a brief recap of the eight reportable incident types those of you who have looked at the draft guidance or watched the most recent series webinar will be well aware of the similarities and differences between sir's in-home services and service in residential care by way of recap the five reportable incident types that are defined in exactly the same way for both residential care and Home Services are unlawful sexual contact or inappropriate sexual conduct unreasonable use of force psychological or emotional abuse neglect and stealing or financial coercion by a staff member the remaining three types of incidents you might recall are the ones that differ for Home Services compared with how the service operates in a residential care setting these are Unexpected death missing consumers and inappropriate use of restrictive practices an explanation of how these three incident types differ was included in our previous service reportable incidents webinar which you can watch on our YouTube channel now let's consider how providers submit a notification some of you are from the residential aged care setting will already be well familiar with reporting but for some of you on this particular webinar this is going to be quite new all aged care providers must have an incident management system and IMS and as part of that you must establish procedures to identify manage and resolve incidents you should also document the roles and responsibilities of staff to follow these procedures and to prevent incidents from occurring to report a serious incident your organization must be registered to access the Department of Health and aged Care's my aged care service and support portal the department provides access for one administrator in each organization and those administrators in turn need to set up access for additional staff to submit notifications we're now going to move to a demonstration of how to begin using the portal back to you Janet all right thank you Catherine uh my role here is is is by way of Segway very useful introduction Catherine to the next segment um which as you say is a practical demonstration of how to use the my aged care portal um and I'm going to invite Jade Austin from the Department of Health and age aged care to talk us through this and then lead us into a series of very short videos which provide you with a very useful guide as to what you need to do Jane thank you thank you Janet yes so I'm Jade from the strengthening providers Branch within the Department of Health and aged care the department manages the my aged care portal which is used by providers for various functions and will also be used to submit a service notification form which is then received by the commission so the search notification form will appear in the portal on 1 December 2022 for in-home care providers today we will provide a brief video demonstration on the search notification form in home care the video will show you what the notification form looks like and talk you through the process for creating and submitting a surge notice we will pause during the video to answer questions that have been raised the department has also developed a user guide which is available on the department's website and the link will be circulated after the webinar let's now turn to the best first segment of the video hello everyone as you have uh no doubt worked out for yourselves we're experiencing technical difficulties with our videos which is a real shame because we had three lined up for you each of them designed to to give you information about the ways in which you would access the my aged care portal it really doesn't matter though because uh we can make those videos available to you online uh and you won't miss out on anything what I'm going to do instead of running those videos is to go back to Catherine Kiana um she has some important tips and tricks about reporting uh and also so a few things to say about the subcontractor arrangements and and whether that is in scope for sirs so Catherine how about you pick it up from here thank you thanks Janet I think we'll kick off with this subcontractor issue as you may recall from the last webinar and once you talked about this particular Hot Topic and even if you've engaged another organization or worker to deliver some or all of a consumer's care and services you as the provider remain responsible for ensuring the delivery of safe and quality care and services to meet your well-being your service responsibilities I also want to have a bit of a talk about why it's important to report quality of reporting and let's talk about some tips too it's important to keep in mind that when a provider supplies clear and comprehensive information early on it's less likely that the commission will need to ask for further details or require the provider to conduct an investigation or in some cases directly investigate the matter itself I'd now like to focus on some of the details often missed when a notice is reported so these include not providing enough detail about an incident not providing an explanation or rationale when assessing the incident and the impact or harm to the consumer and not explaining what actions are being taken to minimize the risk of the incident occurring again we understand that you won't always have all of the necessary information available to you within the first 24 hours when you're submitting a priority one or a P1 notice your notifications should still include as much detail as possible about what happened what steps you've taken to ensure the immediate safety health and well-being of the affected consumer and also what else you plan to do to assess the causes of and plan your overall response to the incident make sure that you include enough information so that a person who wasn't there can understand what happened it's important to remember too that once you submit a service notification you can't go back in to edit it and resubmit it okay Catherine I have a question for you that's coming money has asked how does the 24-hour reporting timeline work for services who provide care outside business hours that's a really great question essentially your reporting period is 24 hours for a P1 notice and 30 days for a priority one or a P2 notification what I think we really need to talk about here is that regardless of the day of the week you're still obliged to make a report within those time frames but I think the key issue we need to recognize here is that you must report the incident when you become aware of it so we acknowledge that a provider may not become aware of an incident occurring for some time after the incident but once a provider is made aware of the incident those reporting obligations apply okay um I have another question which takes us into uh what we were going to cover after the next video now the the 24-hour period for a priority one uh is not the only notification that we all report that we would be looking for uh there is also a five-day reporting window can you just elaborate on that a bit sure oftentimes because oftentimes because there is not enough information available during that first 24 hours of reporting there may be a need to provide further information to complete a notification or indeed significant information may become available at a later date that you need to notify the commission of so what's really important here is that providers understand that they must provide that information to the commission within five days of reporting complete your notice and provide all information to us and similarly if you become aware of significant other information during the course of investigating the incident or some other issue comes up you must notify the Commission in relation to that okay now I'm going to give you a chance to recap something you said slightly earlier um this this concept of of completing a notification it's key isn't it it enables us at the commission to understand how the provider has appreciated the incident and what actions they've taken just want to give us a little bit on that yeah absolutely completion of a notification really enables us to ensure that we've got enough information at the commission to be able to assess how you've understood the details of the incident and assess the harm and impact on the consumer and how you're going to use the information to provide Incident Management so that completion is incredibly important for us to be able to carry out our role at the commission okay now one of the videos we were going to show provides details of how a provider or worker can view as soon as notification how they can edit or delete a draft notification um whether they can upload multiple search notices at once and also give some guidance on where they can find further assistance is there anything from that that you want to draw out and talk to quickly or would you prefer us just to leave the video to do its job when we can make that available to webinar participants afterwards I think what I would say in relation to that um Janet is that the it's really important for providers to view those videos after um this particular session's finished and reach out to us and ask further questions by utilizing this is phone line and email yeah that's a good tip um and I would definitely second that we've deliberately established this expedited way of contacting the commission if you have questions if you're uncertain about what to do um give us a bill give give us a ring send us an email probably better to email but whatever you want because we're aware that for many of you this is novel you're unfamiliar with sirs particularly if you're only delivering home services so this is first time round for you uh and we we are ready to assist you in whatever way we can now now um Catherine to to uh to close out this session I wonder whether you could give us some examples uh of home services related incidents that would be reportable and then possibly an example or two of an incident that wouldn't be reported because I think this is a way of illustrating for um the participants exactly what would be in scope and possibly not subject to the reporting requirements thanks Janet I can definitely do that I think um let's run through a couple of examples that would be reportable and let's start with an example of unreasonable use of force let's consider a scenario where perhaps a personal care worker arrives to assist a consumer to have a shower and during the episode of care the consumers not cooperating with the care workers instructions that are perhaps a little bit wriggly a little bit resistant to having the shower and the care worker grabs the consumer's arm and uses that Force to focus that consumer's attention and in doing so they bruise the arm of the consumer this is very clearly an incident that's been carried out in connection with the care and services being provided and is a priority One reportable incident let's also now think about a neglect scenario a care worker arrives at a consumer's home and they're assisting with domestic cleaning in line with their agreement and in this case perhaps start cleaning the kitchen floor the consumer struggles with mobility and perhaps has a mild cognitive impairment and that care worker carries out their duties cleans the floor and tells the consumer to not go into the kitchen until the floor dries so whilst the care worker puts the mob and the bucket away in the laundry the consumer's gone into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and has slipped on the wet floor and this has resulted in a fractured wrist this incident also happened in the connection with care and services and would be reportable as a priority One reportable incident if we now think about an example that would not be reportable if we consider the category stealing or financial coercion by a staff member we know that sometimes providers will receive reports or information about family members who have allegedly stolen money or Goods of value from the consumers and whilst this is not reportable under sirs because it's a family member not the staff member who is involved in this incident we'd expect that providers would record this incident in their Incident Management System and take any appropriate action outlined in their existing policies and procedures to ensure the safety and the well-being of the consumer so Janet that's a couple of examples of what would be reportable and one that would not be reportable okay really useful um we've published resources we've made mention of those a couple of times can you just uh for people's information just mention again um the the number that they can ring uh or uh indeed the email line we can make this available to everyone who's registered after the webinar but just say it out loud so people have it uh that they you know if they have a pen handy absolutely I'd like to also remind everybody we've got the draft guidelines for providers currently on the commission's website and we really want to encourage you to call and speak to our team here so call us for free 1-800-081-549 we're here Monday to Friday nine to five and we're even available on the weekend Saturday and Sunday 8 30 to 5 P.M you can also reach out to us as Janet mentioned via email and that's at sirs at agecare quality.gov dot a u thanks John well done and I've also managed to confirm that we will send the links to the videos via email to everyone who's registered for this webinar you don't even have to go and look for them uh we'll make sure that you get an email with the link so you can have a quick look at them at in your own time thank you very much uh Catherine particularly and also Jade uh uh I I actually think that is a really useful practical introduction to some of the detailed um operational Machinery of surge in Home Services uh and as Catherine said there's there's more to be learned through the guidance that we've published in the videos that you can watch separately um very keen to get your feedback on this webinar including uh that you may have been disappointed not to see the videos uh as we had hoped to show them but we are nonetheless always Keen to get your feedback because we're very interested in continuous Improvement and learning from these exercises about how we can assist you in being a better provider so um at the end of the webinar if you want to click on the yellow speech bubble icon um you will bring uh to Vision the a very short survey we'd love you to complete it it will actually pop up automatically if you wait till the very end of the webinar you can do it before we get there if you want and just give us your feedback on the webinar and what you liked or what could have been done better to suit you another reminder also we're getting some really good questions in there is the opportunity if you submit questions as we go and we will have time at the end to to take as many of them as possible so keep them coming now I'd like to move on to the the third speaker Leanne Emerson who's the executive director of services at dementia Australia now Leanne's going to talk about um home services for people living with with dementia and serves in that context and also of course the importance of person-centered Care thank you Leanne thanks Janet uh hello everyone um first of all I'd like to also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are meeting today and pay my respects to their Elders past present and to our shared futures um it won't come as any surprise to this audience that dementia is one of the largest Health and Social challenges facing Australia and indeed the world in 2022 they're just shy of half a million Australians living with dementia and approximately 65 percent of those live in the community we know that without a medical breakthrough the number of people with dementia is going to increase to almost 1.1 Million by 2056. as you know the Royal commission into age quality and safety reported that 80 of older Australians want to remain living in their homes in their current home and 62 percent of those want to receive community-based aged care services so home-based aged care services support people living with dementia and their families to continue to do that for longer and it continues to provide really important support and enable older people to remain autonomous for as long as possible this makes a substantial difference not only to the lives of people living with dementia but also to their families and carers as well as the broader community and our experience has shown that early intervention and supports are crucial in enabling people to stay in the community and avoid premature entry into residential aged care we also know that Australians have the right to live to a lot to live a life free from abuse and neglect and people with dementia can be specifically vulnerable to some of those things data on occurrence of adverse incidents in home-based care is somewhat limited but given the shared vulnerabilities with recipients of residential aged care it's reasonable to assume that people living with dementia receiving care in the home are more vulnerable to experiencing more Adverse Events than participants with no cognitive impairment the expansions of serves to in-home care and services will provide a much needed Safeguard mechanism for people living with dementia who are one of the most vulnerable groups in our community one of the most important considerations for providers is ensuring that people with dementia are included in all of the conversations that relate to them it's really important not to assume that the not to make any assumptions about the capacity of a person living with dementia just because someone has dementia it doesn't necessarily mean that they lack capacity or lack capacity across all areas transparency and communication with the person living with dementia and their family is key in the context of Home Care people living with dementia are both vulnerable to incidence is happening to them but in some cases may also be the instigator of a serious incident and this can kind of create really complex situations as Janet has already uh spoken about aged care providers must have appropriate Incident Management and occupational health and safety systems in place that ensure that those sorts of situations are managed as well as reducing the likelihood of serious incidents occurring it's important that any framework follows a human rights-based approach recognizes the dignity and autonomy of people living with dementia and upholds their right to expression this is where principles of person-centered care are also useful this involves developing a thorough understanding of the individual person and giving consideration to their cultural background personal history social and family networks and preferences for activities in designing their care the more you know about the person the more you can plan and be prepared to communicate in a way that's best for them knowing the person well means that change behaviors can be picked up early and serious incidences avoided which of course is the first step that we want to take where an incident is outside of sir's responsibility it's still important that incidents are managed and reported to the appropriate party for example if a care recipient be that a person with dementia or a carer has been threatened harmed or is in any kind of imminent danger as care providers we have a responsibility to do what we can to prevent further harm if there's an incident between Akira and the person with and the person that they are caring for while it isn't reportable while it isn't a reportable incident under serves it is likely to be an incident that needs to be reviewed or investigated managed documented future events prevented where possible and in some instances other obligations to report to authorities health professionals or family members so I think it's really important to look at how we can prevent and manage incidences both within sirs where that applies and outside of it it's also estimated that the prevalence of restrictive practices in home care may be as high as 24.7 percent whilst having robust incident reporting mechanisms are important preventing serious incidents from occurring should always be the primary goal and to this end dementia Australia believes that all aged care workers must have the necessary education and skills to support people living with dementia that that will not only result in better outcomes for recipients but also in increased confidence for the workforce and a way to de-escalate and be responsive to incidences as they occur this includes having a really thorough understanding of change behaviors in people with dementia how to identify those how to appropriately communicate with people as their dementia progresses and that includes understanding non-verbal cues which I think are key when we're also looking at how to assess what might be a critical incidence as well as knowing how to report critical incidents to the commission to support the expansion through In-Home Care we know dementia education leads to fewer risk incidences lower rates of inappropriate use of medication and restrictive practices and more positive staff attitudes so we feel very strongly that aged care providers and staff need to start from a place of learning as much as they can and understanding dementia so that they're better equipped to continue to support people with dementia we know from our work and Broad consultation with people living with dementia and their families and carers that their view is if we get quality care right for people living with dementia then we get quality care right for everyone thank you uh well done Leanne thank you very much for those insights and uh really useful way of understanding uh some of the the challenges but also the opportunities I think um that are present for Home Service workers and providers in delivering first-class experiences of aged care for um Home Service recipients that brings it into our presentations and it's now time to turn to your questions and gosh there are a lot of them so well done you um Catherine there are a fair few for you so I'll put you on notice um first one is from Richard he wants us to clarify uh you you mentioned the uh the timing of notification and talked about when the provider becomes aware and what Richard's asked is is this the staff member in the client's home witnessing the incident or is it when the staff member notifies their line manager now I'm not sure that we would uh create a huge Chasm between those two Would we not expect that a care worker would be in in touch with their employer fairly quickly if they were to observe or an event or an event occurred an incident occurred Catherine that's exactly right um Jenna we'd expect that providers have um you know policies and procedures in place that enable staff to understand their role and responsibility in Pro in reporting serious incidents to so we're ensuring that there is uh not a big Chasm as you suggested between when that incident occurs and the staff member is aware of it and then makes the provider um or other managers line managers aware of what has actually happened so I think in terms of the key takeaway here we're really thinking about are staff trained and do they understand their role and responsibility in relation to service reporting okay um there's another one here which I've lost uh I'll need to come back to it um there's a question about volunteers and an individual said that they have a lot of Volunteers in their service who visit care recipients in their homes and what are their reporting responsibilities under servers are they included Catherine that's another great question and we know that within the Home Services sector there are a lot of volunteers and they play a very important role in care delivery it's a provider's responsibility to ensure that volunteers within their organization know how to report a service so um similarly to the staff question what we really want to see is that providers have a very clear reporting pathway within their IMS they communicate that to their volunteers and have a way for volunteers to report a serious incident in a timely way back to the provider to ensure that they then can provide a notification to us at the commission and undertake their role and responsibility in accordance with their obligations okay another one for you Catherine I'm really lining them up here um if a client has this is from schmidty um if a client has a fallen in in hospital on the weekend uh our services are not there at the time of the Fall do we need to report the incident that's also another really good question I think that there's probably a few other questions that might need to be answered to be able to respond to that but generally what we can say is if a fall happens um in the absence of care as in nobody is providing care at the time you arrive at some point later and a fall has happened that is not necessarily a um a reportable incident it may be a reportable incident if something happened that was in connection with care and resulted in that fall but I think what for the purpose of this conversation what we're really saying here is sometimes incidents happen in somebody's home where care is not being delivered and in those on those occasions um it's unlikely they're a reportable incident okay and um Rody's asked about the period for reporting for the um the priority two incidents um he thought he uh uh I think it's a he thought that at year 21 days but uh you're just clarifying it's 30 days isn't it that's correct yeah 30 days for P2 that's correct okay and um you did make mention earlier about uh this 24 hours but the question is do weekends and public holidays impact uh on sir's reporting time frames perhaps we should just be clear about that Catherine absolutely so incidents that occur on weekends and public holidays they still need to be reported to the commission within the correct time frames we know that sometimes a provider may not become aware of the incident until sometime after that incident occurs and this relates to those previous couple of questions somewhat but once a provider becomes aware of an incident they must report it within the priority one and priority two time frames okay I'm going to give you a break um Leanne this notion of impact uh is is a really interesting one and I know that a lot of people talk about the difficulties or the challenges of assessing impact uh from a serious incident where the individual who has been affected uh may have some degree of cognitive impairment which affects their their communication and recall so I guess what I want to hear from you is what suggestions do you have for Aged care workers who are trying to assess impact they know an incident has occurred or they they strongly suspect something has happened but they're they're having to assess impact in order to establish whether it's Priority One or priority two yeah thanks Jenna look uh and I think it's an interesting kind of situation it's often not straightforward but I would also say that um as I said when in my presentation don't assume to begin with it the person with dementia can't talk to you about what's happened sometimes uh soliciting that information from them may need a different approach and take a little more time so I would say uh take the time first of all even if they can't give you the full story or all of the detail they may be able to give you some sense of some pieces of it and often a person with dementia even if they can't tell you what happened they can certainly tell you how they feel um and I think that's a very uh a very important cue to look for is where a person with dementia has an emotional reaction to something that seems to be out of character I think you can also um Garner the information more successfully if you ask close-ended questions so for example um instead of uh this doesn't relate to an incident but instead of asking somebody how was your day you might say did you enjoy your time with Mrs Smith so you can get a yes or no you know a fairly black and white kind of response um I think the other thing to look for is changes in their behavior or in their mood that might suggest that something has occurred and then inquire about that I think you need to uh look for them not wanting to attend previously loved loved activities or reacting differently to people they would normally be comfortable around um and I think the other thing to do obviously is look for other physical signs um I think talk to family and others who are involved in the person's care to see if they're picking up anything that appears different or a different impact on the person with dementia and I think then you know the other important thing is to is to consider ongoing observation you know even if you don't have the information you need to determine the priority at that point in time you know it's likely that over time that will start to become that'll be elucidated so so take some time and I think communicate the way you approach the person with dementia in a way that aids them to be able to communicate most successfully with you has a has a lot to has a lot to do with it very wise words thank you for that um I I expect that people will be heading towards your agency uh for further advice of that York because there's a lot to be learned from from that detailed understanding of the ways in which we can still respond in a very person-centered way to each individual irrespective of their of their presenting circumstances Leanne another one for you and this is one that Marie has asked online and which also came in as a prior question and it's about where a care worker observes something happening that someone else is doing uh which therefore moves it out of the scope of fall reporting under the serious response scheme but it's nonetheless a troubling practice so the one that's come through from Maria's uh what are your thoughts about families who keep their family members with dementia locked inside homes when they're out but the individual doesn't have to be supervised while they are out um and then the the one that we received beforehand is um what should a carer do if they notice a family member using a restrictive practice with an elderly relative with cognitive impairment such as keeping them indoors or placing their Walker Out Of Reach so what are your thoughts on a is it reportable and my understanding is it's actually outside the the guidance that we provide in terms of incidents occurring in the course of care but it's nonetheless sufficiently troubling that you wouldn't want to ignore it so what's your advice yes and actually we have this in our kind of work at dementia Australia we come across this quite often actually so no I I don't believe it is reportable through sirs if it's a behavior that's happening between family members or or others that are not um Commonwealth funded providers of care but I would say if you believe that a person with dementia is uh being neglected or harmed in any way there's still action to be taken and I think a really good place to start is by contacting open or one of the senior rights organizations across the country who can do a bit more investigating than what you are able to do as a provider as a rule but I think the other thing to consider is um often for family carers this comes down to a lack of understanding and information about dementia um I think there's some easy things that you can suggest to families who may be well intended but not offering the best solution by way of encouraging them to have a have their GP or another health professional review what's going on um and suggest some other strategies to minimize any kind of real or perceived risk um I think there's also uh you know a strong argument for uh sending the family and carers in the direction of getting him some information and and support and quite often our role is in coaching them if you like around other ways of managing whatever their concern is or whatever the behavior is in a way that doesn't move to restrictive practices so you know I think it's not a black and white situation you need to both be able to address the behavior that's that's not okay but also you know skill the skill the Family Care is improve their capacity to be able to manage that situation in another way because you know really nine times out of ten it's well-meaning family who just don't know a better way yeah I think a further really good advice thank you for that Leanne Jade I'm getting a lot of questions on the my aged care portal so I'm going to come to you with with some of them to to start uh if a writer has never used the my HQ portal and I expect we do have a few of them online um how can they get access to it Janet thank you um so as mentioned before so providers will require access to the my aged care portal portal to notify the commission if a reportable incident occurs so this is the same portal that providers use to manage information about their services manage referrals update client records generate reports and ask assessors to review a client's support plan so if there are any providers that still don't have access to the my aged care portal they should contact the my aged care service provider and assessor helpline for assistance and the number there is 1-800-836-799-1800-836-709 so for providers that already have access to the my aged care portal the says notification form will appear on one December 2022 so the organization administrator can manage staff access to the portal including creating accounts and granting staff already on the portal access to the service tile so information about how to provide a staff member with access to the service tile is included in the user guide that is now published on the department's website and will circulate the link after this webinar as well okay thank you um Jay there's a there's a follow-up question in relation to the submission of additional information um Catherine spoke about the the information which can come in within that five-day period after the first notification and the questions being asked is that also submitted through the my aged care portal can you answer that um I'll have to take that one on notice that is a very good question but I believe there's also there could be a mechanism where you might direct um direct con directly contact the commission okay Catherine I I don't know where whether you can answer that I can Janet uh that particular um question is best answered by referring uh providers to the approved form on our website and on the Department of Health Website that encourages or is required providers are required to utilize to fill in um it's a form that is guides them in terms of what information they need to provide to us significant use so it's in a format that they can use as a Word document complete that particular form and then email that to the service inbox so it's actually not uploaded into the my aged care portal any of that additional information will need to be completed through the online form um saved and then sent through to the surge inbox um attached as an email okay that's a that's a little complicated where can people read about that so the form will be available on the 1st of December the Home Care Services form on the Department of Health website and also on our website okay so if people visit our website and hopefully and I know it will be well labeled will will identified people can get access to the necessary information and also the the form that's required to be completed that's correct cool okay Catherine we're still getting questions or and Leanne actually but but Catherine I suspect I'll stay with you we're still getting questions around uh what is reportable and Catherine has come in with uh A variation on this theme um Catherine has asked uh whether in the circumstance where a client reports of their son is stealing vast sums of cash from them so you have the potential for financial elder abuse uh is that in scope for reporting if I understand that the question correctly here we're talking about the son who has um is reporting Financial abuse but hasn't occurred by the sun no a bigger part the sun is stealing money from the individual the client uh to whom services are being provided great so in that instance that's similar to the uh non-reportable incident that I talked about before in the sense that stealing or financial coercion by a staff member is certainly well within the scope of the scheme and we would expect uh providers to report that type of incident but where it's stealing or alleged stealing by a family member we would expect providers to take that up through their existing IMS processes and escalate that through Pathways that they would already have established for managing Financial coercion so referring clients off to an appropriate support person or organization um or advising the consumer of their options but certainly having processes themselves in place to manage that but it's not a reportable incident for service okay we will probably need to provide some more examples of that uh on our website because it does seem to be an area where where people have uh questions and understandably so we do need to uh offer as much clarity as possible as you've as you've sought to do in your answer um jade I'm going to come back to you uh my age care pool continues to attract a lot of interest um this is a technical question uh are there any plans for my aged care to release an API for integration with internet management systems to enable automatic report uploads thank you so there are currently no plans in place to incorporate an application programming interface or API for the my aged care portal including the service dashboard so as part of the Surs providers must have their own Incident Management System in place and the scale of each provider's Incident Management System will vary across providers to meet their own particular circumstances as well the software used by providers so we have an imposed requirements to use a particular software for the IMs so incorporating an API poses broader challenges in terms of compatibility skill sets and in-house infrastructure and network requirements thank you thanks Jade um a technical answer to a tip question well done um Catherine back to you more questions um and this goes to the eight uh reportable incident types A very particular question from Jane uh are all sirs incidents expected to be reported to police uh accepting inappropriate use of restrictive practice now the answer is no uh but you might want to elaborate on that that's correct Janet um not all incidents are reportable to police um and the guidance on our website will be able to give you we wouldn't have time today to go through each instant type but I would suggest that you refer to our guidance on the website which gives clear um indication of which incidents are reportable to police and in what situations I think that is um the best way to answer that one right now yeah well done uh I do think it does require that degree of study so I do commend people to again read up on the rules so that you know exactly what is reportable to police which is a subset of the issues which are reportable to the commission Catherine a few people have asked and it's a perfectly reasonable question what do we do with the sirs incident reports when we receive them thanks Janet um information that's notified through the service and indeed we use other sources of information um that the commission does to inform our regulatory intelligence and data to enable the commission to more effectively detect and analyze and respond to risks of con to Consumers our intelligence and data including service reports informs the commission's risk profiling of providers and the prioritization and scope of our monitoring activities as well we also use that to support the development of sector education our campaigns and obviously Target regulatory approach approaches on particular issues as well okay and uh again now the guidance that we've spoken about several times now which is still draft but which we expect to finalize very shortly um that's that's fairly extensive but what sorts of things can providers find in that document if they if they access it through our website just by way of example that's good question so um the draft guidance document is going to give you information around responding to incidents how you assess an incident your IMS requirements it's even going to touch on things like continuous Improvement you can find within the guidance information around all eight reportable incident types how you should assess and classify incidents it's a really great resource for being able to give you that sort of practical advice around what to do and prepare yourself for the Readiness of the scheme going live on the 1st of December there's information around Priority One and priority two reporting the time frames for reporting and there's also some troubleshooting in there frequently asked questions and more importantly what is and what isn't um a particular incident type so there's great guidance within those those documents that we've provided in draft format already on the website wonderful last question I'm going to throw to Leanne Leanne you get the final say and I want it to be consumer centered because you and your organization excel at that um we've had a number of questions where concerns have been identified about abuse or mistreatment of an individual with dementia where the care worker is observing this happening within a family unit there are places that specialize in providing advice and support and what would your advice be in terms of referrals where that is being witnessed in a particular home yeah thanks Janet look what I'd say is you know this comes up all too often unfortunately and I think there's a number of places that as service providers you can go to either get advice about how to manage that or to in fact report a concern a couple of good places to start with the older person's advocacy Network or opan or in fact our national dementia helpline both of those Services can talk through your concerns and try to offer some guidance around how to manage those and where you might go for further support any one of the senior rights organizations across the country and they're slightly got slightly different names state to state the best place really to report concerns of elder abuse of any kind including neglect and financial abuse um so I would suggest that maybe call either open or dementia Australia in the first instance if you want to kind of toss around what your what you believe to be happening and get some help with that but senior rights is the best place to refer to I think once you feel that you have a legitimate concern that needs to be further investigated well done thank you so basically the serious incident response scheme is one part of a larger whole and we want you to study and understand those reportable incidents that that must come to the commission but equally uh it's vital that you have an internet management system and that you have these other services available to you if it doesn't fall within the guidance for reporting under the serious instant response scheme but it's nonetheless troubling and you are concerned that that individual uh need may need some assistance in uh in protecting their rights that brings us to uh very close to the end of the webinar thank you to everyone who has submitted questions and I'm sorry we weren't able to get to all of them but we gave it a good try um any questions that we didn't get to and there are some we will uh answer and then put online so that you can uh have have your issue addressed I know there's a lot of change happening in the leader to the first of December and indeed following from the 1st of December we will continue to support you to learn what you need to learn by providing with guidance and advice um this webinar is being recorded so it will be available on our YouTube channel afterwards and we will send a link to you we'll also send a link to the videos that we weren't able to see today my great thanks to Catherine Jade and Leanne for participating this webinar and sharing with us all their wisdom I am sure that you have found it as useful as I did and as informative as we head towards the go live on the 1st of December thank you everyone for participating my apologies again that we weren't able to show you the videos but the next best thing is that we will send you the link in order that you can watch them please stay online and fill out the survey give us some feedback on this webinar allow us to learn and get better at this all the time thanks everyone take care this presentation provides an overview of the processes for reporting incidents via the serious incident response scheme tile on the my aged care provider portal access and permissions to report incidents through the portal will depend on your user role administrators hold the majority of permissions and can provide staff with access to the Surs portal this includes providing access to subcontractors and third parties this is the home page of the my aged care provider portal administrators can provide employees with appropriate access through the staff Administration tile to ensure they're assigned an appropriate user role steps on this process are available in the reference guide to create and submit a new incident notice select the surge notice tile on the home page and then select submit new notice to begin filling out a new says notice form a new tab will open containing imported information regarding the search notice read this information carefully then select the next button to proceed complete the relevant information on the your details tab this is one that we have pre-populated with dummy user data for the purpose of this demonstration please be sure that you have entered information for each field marked with an asterisk once you have finished navigate to the incident details tab by clicking the next button this is where we complete the details of the incident a handy tip if you are unsure of what is being asked select the question mark icon for an explainer paragraph this explainer provides important information about Priority One and priority 2 incidents for this example we will make this reportable incident a priority One we have completed the incident details including who made the allegation the details of the incident the incident type and have provided a detailed description we can now select next to complete the people involved tab here we have completed the details of the people involved the affected care recipient their level of cognition the level of psychological impact the level of physical impact and the subject of allegation details you can include up to six subjects of allegation here when finished this section select next to arrive at the action taken tab here we have completed the details on the actions taken this incident has been reported to the police the Aged care recipients representative their family for example have been contacted we have outlined the specific actions taken to ensure the health safety and well-being of the Aged care recipient and specific actions taken to manage or minimize the risk of this reoccurring and we have included some further details in relation to this notice after completing all four tabs of the sirs form you'll be taken to the review and submit page if mandatory information is missing a red X will appear at the bottom of the relevant page summary on the review and submit page review the information you have entered you can navigate back to any tabs requiring edits using the pencil on the right once you have finished reviewing the information select submit a confirmation message will be displayed to confirm that the notification is ready for submission click submit to send the notification the submit a notification can now be viewed in the list of existing notifications please note once a form is submitted it cannot be retrieved or deleted administrators team leaders and staff members can view existing service notices based on their permissions you can do this by selecting The View and update existing notices tile on the service page of the portal once you have found the appropriate notice in the table select the relevant incident ID to view the notice you can now View and navigate through the draft or submitted notification using the next button administrators team leaders and staff members can edit or delete sir's notices based on their permissions should you wish to edit or delete draft search notices follow the same process to find the draft serves notice and select the pencil symbol to edit the draft notice or select the bin symbol to delete a pop-up will appear prompting you to confirm your deletion once a notification is deleted it will not appear anywhere on the portal and cannot be searched for organization and Outlet administrators can upload multiple priority to serves notices at once with the bulk upload function first notices which contain multiple subjects of allegation or Priority One incidents cannot be progressed through the bulk upload function to submit a bulk upload select the bulk upload tile on the Surs page bulk uploads need to conform to a specific template in order to be valued once you have completed the template upload the file to the bulk upload page this is an example that we pre-populated once you commence the upload of the file processing of the file will begin as indicated by the processing status in the table once the status changes to processed or processed with errors select the magnifying glass symbol to view the upload details an upload validation page will be displayed listing The Source notices uploaded from the template each notice contained within the bulk upload will be listed in a separate row notice us with a ready for submission status contain no errors and can be submitted immediately by selecting the paper airplane symbol on the right hand side of the notice you can also submit all notices which are ready for submission by selecting the submit all valid reports button notices with an action required status possess errors and must be edited before submission to edit a draft notice select the pencil symbol on the right hand side of the notice the system automatically uploads these into the form so you can easily progress through the form to see where the errors are and make the appropriate amendments