Disability support organizations and office culture part two
Disclaimer – That these are my own lived experiences and
understanding from the research that I
do around the NDIS and health-related topics please be aware that it is
informational only and not to be used as a substitute for professional advice
or working with a Planner, Disability Advocacy service or talking to your
Medical and Allied Health team.
So this is a continuation
of disability and ethics in disability service providers, I found that I needed
to go back and seek out the very basics around this to educate myself on this
as well. As, unfortunately, ethics can be
a tricky subject when it comes to disability because personal ethics
play a role as well, and personal ethics vary from person to person and the training from disability
service providers varies from person to person and organization to organization
as well as having a good framework that they work from. A good ethical framework is one that everyone from
the boss down is aware of and works within and is reviewed when necessary, this could be every six months or every year
but it needs to be reviewed when there are changes around the legalities around
working with people with a disability and how to best support them.
We also see that a good organization is one that will listen to it's clients and make changes when required for the client and respects the client's wishes and abilities, as well as communicates in an effective manner with the client, and knows when to follow up with a client as well as working to decrease the need for support in higher functioning clients. While at the same time working with them to give them the right level of support needed to keep them at the level of function they are used to, and this prevents them from having maladaptive behavior in acting out.
This is a really big one for me and lets me know in the
comments below if it’s yours as well as if they have a best practice framework or
are lagging behind in this area. As this
is really important to have a great understanding of the best practices around disability
support due to the dynamic environment does it just apply to the support
workers on the ground or does it apply to everyone working in that organization
and are they made to be aware of it?
What seems to be the biggest failing of a lot of large
support providers is the lack of accountability when something goes wrong they have a way of blame-shifting, and providing an apology that isn’t taking account
of things that they could have done so much better as if they could do things
better and was really invested in being person-centered they could do so and
this is such a big thing to be person-centered.
I did talk about being a person-centered support organization but what person-centered
need to look like is really important so is it the client that they are person-focused and focused on the
client's development and goals or is it supporting the support workers to
support the clients as both is client focused but one is more targeted and having
both supported in the office is really important.
I think at this point it is important to recognize that support organizations are running a business but like any business that is working with the vulnerable, they need to have good ethics and policies that people work with because people have the right to and will change service providers if they feel that
they aren’t receiving the support they deserve.
So this is where what goes on in the office is really
important as a really great support worker can be hamstrung by the office if
they are trying to support the person and if the person has complex behavior and the office does nothing to support that person we see that they are limited
in the work that they can do for and with the person.
I am also aware that this can come back to funding issues and
funding can be a very tricky one for people as they might need more support
than the plan allows for but this is where having good value for money is really
important and this is where it comes back to having a person-centered frame
work.
I will do a post and a video on what person-centered means as
it means different things to different people and it really does depend on what
the person's skills are and their goals as well as the funding they have in their
plan and their support workers skills and abilities to support the person in
what they are trying to achieve.
As I have repeatedly said that a great support worker can
be hamstrung by a bad office culture and surprisingly when doing the research
for this post there were many people who I talked to felt that their offices
were more interested in the money than supporting the person and this is a
really interesting one because without clients a support organization
doesn’t have a business.
They can have the best support workers but if both clients
and support workers aren’t given the support they need to achieve goals or do their best work they can’t give effective and personal support.
One big example is a person not following through on their promises from the
office to have a consistent team of support workers and this is trauma-inducing for a person who has issues explaining what they need from that support worker.
So if the office is more focused on KPI and key performance
metrics and does not care about a person we see that they need quality management, but again
quality management is a subjective term and what one person sees as quality support
may not be when a support worker is in the field, as quality management is defined as quality management – the term
‘quality management’ describes the systems and processes an organization has in
place to monitor, review, plan, control and ensure the quality of services, supports
or products.[i] So as
a support organization are they more focused on relationship management or
relationship building as these are two fundamentally
different things that mean different things to different people, [ii]
So this is a really big one to look out for does the office have a stated ethics framework, [iii]
and whether are workers both in the office and in the “field” so to speak follow it, and
if they breach it what are the consequences for the person who breached it are
they removed from support or just moved to higher functioning clients and are they retrained in quality support
and preventing harm from happening again? Or are they more focused on just
having the staff deliver the services rather than investing in training up
their support workers to deliver ongoing quality support to the people they
support?
A support worker who has backup from a head office is
more likely to report incidents in more detail if they know that any necessary invistigations will be handled correctly and not blame shifted onto the support workers, as if the office
doesn’t invest in training support workers in harm minimization and learning
about their client's disabilities how can they provide active support to a
person they are supporting?
I know that this post is leaving you with more questions than
answers and this is because this is something that most service providers are struggling with themselves as they have
support workers leave if they can’t answer these basic questions my
question is can they consistently deliver long term quality support to a person
with a disability and there family and friends?
[iii] Ethics and
standards - Australian Community Workers Association - ACWA leads the
development, identity, registration, and recognition of the community work
profession in Australia
National
Standards for Disability Services (dss.gov.au)
Department of Social
Services, Australian Government (dss.gov.au)
NDIS Code of
Conduct | NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission (ndiscommission.gov.au)
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