Presenter: Jen Engels
Presented on 12 October 2022
Welcome everyone. My name is Jen Engels and I will be presenting, 'How to use the Evidence Guide', as part of our Residential Aged Care NDIS registration series of videos.
So, the Evidence Guide is a tool that's been developed as part of the Residential Aged Care Toolkit. And the evidence guide will help you to understand the commonalities and differences, between the aged care and NDIS practice standards requirements. And it will help you to identify what evidence you are likely to already have in place, where requirements are the same and also gives you examples of what evidence may be needed where there are some similarities, or differences in the requirements.
So, it is a guide, it's not a prescriptive list of documents, or evidence that you must have. It's just a guide that has lots of examples in it, because remember, evidence has to be proportional to the size scope and scale of you as a provider and also in terms of the complexities of supports you need to provide, or you are providing to NDIS participants.
So, you'll need to demonstrate evidence during your self-assessment process which is online and you'll also need to demonstrate evidence as part of your certification audit. And so, the evidence guide has a range of different evidence examples in there, from things like policies and procedures to different types of records.
You'll see here there is a scale that shows the similarity between the aged care quality standards and the NDIS practice standards and quality indicators and this scale is replicated throughout. So, you'll find it in the standards comparison tool in the toolkit. You'll find it in the Concordance Table and you'll also find the same scale here in the Evidence Guide. And it outlines similar for green, some similarities are yellow and where it is red that means there's different, they're different requirements and you'll certainly need to develop, or tinker with what you already have in place to fulfil the NDIS requirements.
So, where there are requirements that are the same as aged care requirements, you will still need to demonstrate evidence to the audit team. So, and that is unless your audit team has gained approval from the NDIS Commission to consider results of your most recent aged care audit and that will be on a case-by-case basis.
So, here's what the evidence guide looks like. So, it's a table and we have in the left hand column, we have the comparison. So, you'll see above that, we have person-centred supports and the outcome. So, that's the standard in the NDIS practice standards that provides the outcome and under that we have a list of quality indicators in that third column that says NDIS Quality Indicator. Then that first column we have the comparison so you'll see it talks about some similarities and you'll see that the NDIS Quality Indicator is referenced there but so is the Aged Care Quality Standard. So, it's really easy to see the level of similarity or not.
In the evidence guide section, which is over on the right hand side, you'll see that there's a list of evidence relevant to NDIS standards aged care providers may have in place. And this evidence here is the sorts of evidence that based on the comparison, it is likely that you're already going to have in place or something very similar to what is listed there. It's always that evidence guide area is always a good place to look for ideas as well on evidence.
We'll just give you another example though. So, this example on this slide shows the quality management standard and outcome and this shows the comparison. So, let's look at the first NDIS Quality Indicator. Comparison says that it is different to the aged care quality standard. So, in the evidence guide it talks through, well okay there might be some elements relevant to the practice standards which could be an improvement, continuous improvement, policies and procedures and[MJ1] some records. But then there's a list of additional evidence to consider and you'll see down the bottom right hand side here examples of evidence for you to consider that may be helpful to address these requirements of the NDIS Quality Indicators.
So, please remember everything on this last column, they are examples, it's not a prescriptive list. You might have other evidence that's not even listed here that's relevant to your organisation and that is okay. But we really think it is useful for you to have a look at the evidence guide prior to undertaking your self-assessment and you can use this together with the concordance table. And also again prior to your audit to give you ideas on you know, how you're tracking and then also what sorts of additional evidence you could consider to meet the NDIS Quality Indicators.
So, we hope these tools are useful and thank you very much.