Provider webinar - Module Four – Stage One Desktop Audit- video transcript

Presenter: Sharon Floyd

Presented on 12 October 2022

Welcome everybody, this is Module Four of the series of Webinars designed for Residential Aged Care providers and it is designed to explain a little bit about the first stage of the NDIS Audit process which is known as Stage One the desktop audit process.

Just a reminder for you that for the Certification audits, the audits will focus on the NDIS participants you support, not other residents in your facility and the workers that are going to be involved are those that support NDIS participants, not other workers in your facility.

So, let’s just chat about the Certification audit stages. NDIS Certification audit has a stage one, a desktop audit which is basically a documentation review and then there is a separate stage two onsite audit. So this particular webinar is looking at the stage one part of the audit process.

This slide has a lot of information on it, but basically the major jist of this slide is to emphasise that there’s a lot of planning that actually happens at this stage of the process and it’s a little bit different to the way that it works in the Aged Care sector. Whereas, Residential Aged Care providers undergoing NDIS audits will work closely with the Audit team to arrive at an agreed audit plan and this happens well in advance of the onsite audit itself.

So at this stage the audit team will be requesting from you a range of information about your NDIS participants that will be de-identified, they will be asking some information about your organisational structure, they’ll be clarifying information about your outlets, they’ll be using information gained from you to develop the audit plan. That will spell out very clearly for you what’s going to happen when the onsite audit takes place in terms of timing of interviews, closing meetings, opening meetings, times to review records etcetera.

Also importantly at this stage the audit team will be thinking about whether results from your most recent aged care audit can be used for your upcoming NDIS audit and we will come back to that shortly.

If any of your NDIS participants require supports to engage in the audit process for example, an interpreter, then this will be identified at this stage and you as the residential aged care provider are responsible for organising those type of supports.

So, I mentioned about the results of recent aged care audits. So, there may be scope for your audit team to apply to the NDIS Commission on your behalf to request that they can actually consider the findings of your most recent aged care audit for compliance requirements that are applicable to both aged care and NDIS and this certainly will impact on the extent of evidence that would be required. So this would happen in the Stage One of your audit process.

So, when the audit team gets around to actually going through the document review as part of the desktop audit, what they will be doing is looking at range of documents and a range of information. So, they’ll go back and actually have a look at your completed Self-Assessment that you would have completed as part of your registration application renewal, so that’s what you actually entered into the Commission's portal.

So they’ll look at that information, they’ll also look for your policies and procedures, so hopefully you would have uploaded some of those in the online application renewal, but if not they will chase you up about that and ask you to provide them to them via email or could be other ways.

Also, if the commission has agreed that the audit team can look at the results of the most recent aged care audit then the audit team will certainly look at those aged care audit documents, if the Commission has decided that you are eligible for what’s called a Modified Residential Aged Care NDIS audit.

This will all happen usually offsite and just a reminder at this point, this is why part of the evidence, not looking at records at this stage, just policies, procedures, your self-assessment and any results from an aged care, recent aged care audit if you are eligible for this type of Modified Residential Aged Care NDIS audit.

The audit team, well the auditor will provide you with the findings of the Stage one audit and let you know if, on the basis of that documentation, then it covers off sufficiently on the requirements of the NDIS practice standards and if they think you are ready to undertake the Stage two onsite audit.

You will see there is a note on this slide again to emphasise that policies and procedures as part of this doc review are just one source of evidence and when the actual onsite stage two audit takes place, the audit team will be looking very closely at actually how you are implementing those policies and procedures. And they’ll be doing that through a variety of triangulation of evidence, by looking at records, at files, chatting to participants, talking to staff, looking at a range of other records, registers, there could be a range of other pieces of evidence relevant to your organisation.

Usually stage two should happen within 3 months of the completion of stage one, it tends to happen within six weeks of stage one and that does allow more time for audit planning that we touched on earlier in this particular webinar.

It’s not mandatory that you actually get an audit report as a result of stage one, but certainly the audit team are required to provide you with the findings of stage one.  

So what happens after the stage one audit takes place? Again, you will be working closely with the audit team to plan for the stage two audit and it’s really important to do that planning to make sure that the stage two goes smoothly. You’ve got your interviews set up, you’ve got your processes in place to be able to chat to participants and staff, time set, a schedule and so on.

And, finding out about stage two and what happens in stage two is in Module 5 of this series of webinars and if you want to go back and find out more about stage one and or stage two, Part D of the Residential Aged Care toolkit will provide you with more information.

Thank you for listening.