GRA Supply Chain Consultants

The demand for aged care in Australia has been quickly increasing as Australia’s population grows older and accesses aged care services. Additional to the number of people requiring aged care is the increase in the acute nature of aged care needs. With strong demand for in home aged care as well.

Aged care providers are facing challenges to ensure they have the right workforce and manage their workforce appropriately to deliver quality care. New technologies are enabling greater sophistication in processes relating to workforce planning, optimisation and management.

To have an optimum workforce, there are some important areas to consider:

• Customer value proposition: clearly articulated benefits for customers (e.g. trade-offs between availability, reliability, responsiveness, price).
• Employee value proposition: clearly articulated benefits for employees (e.g. employee engagement, consistent/ flexible hours, training, etc).
• Organisational design: determine right team sizes, escalations paths and reporting lines and skill sets required.
• KPIs, policies and incentives: establish standardised KPI frameworks to drive accountability across the business.
• Recruitment and training: hiring driven by forecasted demand and existing supply base (by location, level and availability).
• Demand planning and forecasting: demand forecasting should link into recruitment (demand and supply balancing, by location, time and level).
• Service and talent optimisation: Ensuring that labour is utilised effectively (avoiding time and skill underutilisation).
• Rostering and service scheduling: standardise scheduling processes to reduce labour costs (avoid rework and double-handling).
• Scheduling efficiency and route optimisation for Home Care services.
• Data and systems: accurate, complete and timely master data to enable effective service chain decision making.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put additional pressure on Australia’s aged care system. The consequences of this can be seen through staff shortages, which can be managed through the points raised above. Supply shortages in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is also causing a challenge for the sector. With an opportunity for many aged care providers to improve their capability to manage PPE by: forecasting demand, improving PPE quantity and location visibility, PPE reporting for management and executive, designing and implementing efficient physical movement of PPE through facilities, and having efficient storage of PPE.

GRA can help with improvements to workforce operational efficiency and PPE management with the following service offerings:

• Forecasting demand
• Rostering and scheduling
• Workforce management
• System implementations and reviews
• Route optimisation
• KPI and policy development
• PPE continuity and pandemic response planning
• Organisational structure design and implementation
• External broker performance management and reporting

Further resources

Video

GRA has been working closely with in-home services and aged care sectors as well as the primary care and hospital networks during the COVID-19 crisis.

In this video Carter McNabb, James Allt-Graham and Shanaka Jayasinghe discuss what we are seeing within these organisations from a supply chain perspective.

We also explore what these organisations need to do moving forward to strengthen their supply chain and service chain functions.

Key points:

In-home Services and Aged Care

Before COVID-19 Australia’s Aged Care sector was going through a step-change following a Royal Commission that was critical of the sector. The Government has since been pushing for in-home care over facility care. The sector has since had the added pressure the comes with COVID-19 such as balancing visitations, managing demand for PPE and the need for transparency.

The supply chain in the Aged Care sector is a service chain involving the distribution of people – ie getting the right people in the right place at the right time.

The greatest logistical challenges facing the sector is around operating processes involving people and technology. Policies such as the customer value proposition and the employee value proposition must be well understood before embarking on a technological transformation. 

Healthcare Sector 

• The industry is set up for ‘business as usual’. These times are anything but ‘business as usual’
• Processes are inconsistent across hospital networks, so it is difficult to scale in a significant way to support core operations
• Technology in most cases is not supplying end-to-end visibility
• A significant challenge is building efficient AND resilient supply chains
• The sector is finding creative solutions to overcome constraints like scarcity of supply such as with PPE Moving forward Australia’s healthcare sector need to focus on:
  • Standardising supply chain processes and procedures
  • Diversify and mitigate risk moving forward

Whitepaper

COVID-19: Australian Health Services Supply Chain - Aged Care Home Services & Residential Care

What does the future of Aged Care look like? COVID 19 and findings from the Royal Commission and will significantly change the Aged Care landscape.

GRA has created an Aged & Residential Care Supply Chain Response program. 

Download GRA's Aged Care Home Services & Residental Care brochure.