Avonlea Project Leading Change, the Respect Way

Pictured above: Together, our wonderful team at Avonlea is leading positive, on-the-ground change, which is further improving the care provided to the home’s residents.

Our Respect Way lean leadership program is all about providing our staff members with the confidence, tools, and skills to continuously look for ways to improve the care we provide residents.

With the program having expanded into Victoria and New South Wales earlier this year, let’s take a look at on one of the current staff-led projects demonstrating on-the-ground change, which promises to help innovate best practice care across all our homes.

Our team at Avonlea – based in Nhill, Victoria – have been investigating the potential root causes behind a common clinical presentation in aged care homes: residents with mobility issues reporting small bruises and minor scratches from an unknown origin.

Supported by Respect Way’s pragmatic approach to problem-solving, staff began their project by drawing on the available data around residents’ clinical presentations to get a sense of areas of potential improvement across the whole care journey, including undertaking an analysis of residents’ daily activities and their interaction with their surrounds.

As Ana van Der Merwe, Respect’s Continuous Improvement Lead, explains: “As is very common in improvement projects, when we shine a light on a problem, it focuses more attention on daily practices, and this assisted team members in identifying incremental yet significant improvement ideas”.

Through this approach, the bigger issue was broken down into a series of smaller stages of care, both proactive and reactive, to help staff determine best practice principles and how they linked together and influenced the end result. 

Following their analysis, the team – led by General Manager Barry Jinks and Registered Nurse Soleil Arboladura – prioritised daily procedures such as de-cluttering residents’ rooms, particularly those living with visual impairments, and increasing the use of limb protectors to help support residents. 

“In addition to these small, yet impactful improvements, our clinical team is supporting new staff members with a mentoring program to improve our shared knowledge base and focus on best practice care,” says Barry. 

“All our new Personal Care Assistants are also being trained in-house by Avonlea’s management team on proper manual handling at the start of their employment, so they no longer have to wait to receive the necessary training from our visiting physiotherapist.” 

Since Avonlea actioned each of these changes, the overall number of residents presenting with skin tears (including those of unknown origin) significantly decreased.   

Ana praised the Avonlea team for their ongoing work in this critical area of care and said the project’s promising results were testament to their great collaboration. 

“Everyone involved in the project has done a wonderful job leading such positive change for our residents, and the early results speak for themselves,” Ana says. “The team will now move into the next phase of the project where learnings and improvements are embedded and sustained, so that the reduction in skin tears remains the best-practice standard moving forward.”