Presenter: Sharon Floyd
Presented on 12 October 2022
Welcome everybody to Module two of this series of webinars designed to help Residential Aged Care providers navigate the NDIS registration process. This particular module is about how to go about completing the online registration renewal process that's a mandatory part for registration. There's six key steps in the registration renewal process that we'll work through with you shortly and we'll come back to each of these steps that appear on this slide in a little bit.
Just wanted to emphasize with you, that you can't actually commence the registration renewal process earlier than six months prior to the registration renewal date and in fact the Commission's portal won't actually allow you to do that in terms of its functionality. On the other hand, you must commence your NDIS registration renewal prior to the registration renewal date. So, make sure you actually factor in the necessary time to do that but remember you can't do it earlier than six months prior to your registration renewal date.
A reminder to make sure that you've got PRODA access as what's called the Registrant role and Module one of this series of webinars explains how to go about getting PRODA access and access to the NDIS Commission's portal.
Once you're in the Commission's portal we've got a screenshot here for you to see, the first thing you'll do is to select My applications and there will be a date that appears there, for when you actually need to commence your renewal by. So, that date will be different for each provider.
These screenshots as we said come directly from the Commission's portal and they're reasonably self-explanatory. So, what you'd be doing is you'll be working through each of the different sections in the left hand menu on the portal and you'll see green ticks when you've completed each section.
You're able to get in and out of your application, you don't need to do it all in the one sitting. So, it's considered draft until you've actually completed and submitted the application.
This screenshot is probably a little bit hard to read because there's a lot of information on there and the font is actually quite small. But the key thing we wanted to point out or come to the next slide actually is about applicant information. So, there's a series of information that's asked of you in the registration renewal process, we're going to look at now Applicant information.
Make sure when you're doing this you actually cover off the detail, the required details because um there's some key information that will be useful, not just for your auditors but also for the Commission when they get to the point of actually looking at your registration decision. So, basic information about organisational details and addresses but importantly information about your Key Personnel. So, key personnel are defined as those individuals that basically are involved in governing or running your organisation. So, those that hold sort of key executive, management, governing body type positions all needed to be listed as part of your application and the Commission looks very carefully at that, when it actually gets to the stage of making its registration decision.
You'll also be asked at this part of the process, some suitability questions and one of the questions is around if your Residential Aged Care organisation has had any compliance notices, or compliance activities issued to it by the Aged Care Quality Commission. So make sure that you include those in this part of the process.
You'll then get to see a range of what's called service delivery questions and these are really important because they actually can turn on within the system certain compliance requirements there's actually 10 of these questions and you're required to answer yes or no and on this particular slide you'll see that there's three of the 10 questions listed. So, you're asked to identify whether in fact you are involved in managing medication, whether you're involved in managing waste, or whether any of your NDIS participants that you support are subject to a restrictive practice and your answers to those questions will ensure that the system then advises you, or it's an automated sort of process of the compliance requirements that you may then need to actually be assessed against.
The other seven questions are around any clinical supports that you may be providing to your NDIS participants and these are listed on the slide. And again your response to these questions if you answer yes will turn on within the system the necessary compliance requirements that you will then be assessed against.
Registration groups are also known as sort of classes of services or types of supports and Residential Aged Care providers are automatically registered for a registration group known as number 115 or 0115, which is assistance with daily life tasks in a group or shared living. Which you know goes hand in hand with the type of residential setting that your supports would be provided. But there may also be some other registration groups that may apply to NDIS participants in residential aged care settings. For example, a high intensity daily personal activities and these are known as registration group number 0104 and these are those clinical supports that you would have already been asked questions about in that previous slide and they could include things like complex bowel care or ventilator management. And these are those additional funded supports that some not all but some NDIS participants may have in their plan, their NDIS plan for those complex health supports, and if that is the case then there are additional compliance requirements.
There's also something you may hear about called module 2A which is not actually a registration group in its own right but it actually is a module of additional compliance requirements for Residential Aged Care providers if you are supporting NDIS participants that are subject to a restrictive practice.
Once you've actually gone through that service information, answered those service delivery questions, thought about registration groups. You'll get to the part of the process where you actually are required to complete a self-assessment and this is important for the audit team. When they actually get to see the results of your application and self-assessment to see actually how you're demonstrating your compliance with the relevant NDIS practice standards. And just a reminder that those compliance requirements are determined by your responses to those service delivery questions. As well as, the registration groups that you've identified.
On this slide, we're just trying to give you a few tips about how to complete that self-assessment because you're actually allowed up to 300 words for each practice standard, to actually complete the self-assessment. It's not intended that the self-assessment needs to be 'war and peace'. Higher level and dot-point responses are fine but with anything that you're putting in a self-assessment, make sure that it is evidence-based. So, there's something that is in there that the audit team can come back to and then follow through as part of the audit for further validation of that evidence.
When you're looking for evidence it's always, we strongly suggest that you look in the residential aged care NDIS evidence guide that's available as part of the toolkit or suggestions of evidence. When it actually comes to you pulling together your self-assessments. You can document your responses directly into the portal if you wish but you could also work offline, and actually use the Residential Aged Care Concordance Table that's provided as part of the toolkit and enter the results from that directly into the portal. And we'll explain in a separate webinar how to go about using that Concordance Table but it's a really good way to sift through the evidence that you already have in place, and maybe some additional evidence that you may need to actually demonstrate how you're complying with those relevant practice standards. Also, we strongly encourage you to upload associated policies and procedures to support your self-assessment and the system will actually let you upload a range of documents.
You will be asked some demographic information about your organisation, in particular the numbers of NDIS participants that are supported by your Residential Aged Care provider and the number of staff that are employed that directly support those NDIS participants. So, just be careful there that you're only talking about the staff that are involved directly in supporting NDIS participants and not non-NDIS participants because they will be outside the scope of the NDIS audit and therefore the NDIS registration process.
There'll be demographical information about your participants - age groups, you'll be asked for information about any outlets within your organisation, and you'll be asked to identify and add which registration groups and professions relevant to those registration groups are available to your NDIS participants from each of those outlets.
And now you're getting to the stage where you may almost be ready to submit your application. We do encourage you to carefully go through your application renewal before you click submit because once you click submit you can't actually make any further changes in the portal and the results of your application are really important in terms of identifying the scope for your audit and also for obtaining quotes from audit bodies. So, it's really important to get the details correct for your audit scope.
Once you have clicked submit, congratulations for getting to that stage of the process, and then you'll need to start thinking about how you're going to be selecting an audit body and module 3 of this series of webinars will provide you with some guidance and some tips about how to go about engaging and approve quality auditing body.
We hope you found this webinar useful. Thank you for listening.