LIFESTYLE CALENDARS
With NWSS’ beliefs around building and enriching lives and, NDIS’ requirements for “person centred” approaches, NWSS is developing a new way of ensuring that shared home residents and individual clients have a good spread of home and community-based lifestyle activities/events in their lives.
Rosters are always carefully managed to ensure NWSS’ commitment to the surety of agreed rostered hours and a fair spread of relief hours for its support workers.
However, even though many support workers work hard on lifestyle activities, our current rosters don’t provide the surety of a good flow of activities/events made up of what shared home residents and individual clients like to do and would like to try.
We are now trialling an electronic roster system (ERS) with the following programmatic features:
· Rosters:
o will be referred to as Lifestyle Calendars
o will replace the current roster format
o will replace social calendars
o will follow the life affirming morning to night flow
o will show who is on shift
o will show the prescribed activities/events in each shift for each client
Building Better Lives will be adjusted to continue the prescribed personal, life affirming records for each client such as:
- A Lifestyle Calendar
- Daily/Shift Reports
- A Daily Journal
- A Travel Diary for holidays away
- Photo albums – Electronic and hard copies
- Video recordings.
- Treasured items’ box.
Nothing will change for support workers in terms of rostered hours and lines but what happens on each shift for clients will be prescriptive to bring more surety.
The activities will be agreed with clients, the important people in their lives and, their support teams and become compulsory and signed off on through Daily/Shift Reports. When activities don’t occur, they will need to have been preceded with a reason to the Service Coordinator or followed very quickly with the reason thereafter.
These Lifestyle Calendars and Daily/Shift Reports will become critical evidence of life building for both NWSS and NDIS audits.
NWSS will also have a report back system from the people providing the activities on how they think the sessions are going, the help they are getting from support workers and client response.
The lifestyle activities in each shift will be recorded in the new electronic roster system that will become accessible to support workers. In the meantime, to start this off, the activities will be dated and timed in shared home communication diaries.
Daily/Shift Reports and Journals will ask for comment on the lifestyle activities/events.
As we move into the project we would like ideas, suggestions, and feedback. We know that there are a lot of good things that happen for independent clients and shared home residents, but we must now make sure they are protected and happen consistently.
This project will be supported by reviewing the photos and décor in residents’ rooms to reflect the things they are involved in.
The steps that will be followed to launch Lifestyle Calendars are as follows:
1. The Program Management Team will start entering lifestyle activities/events in the ERS and shared home communication diaries. The full details for a person’s lifestyle activities will be kept in their Individual Support Plans
3. Invitations will be sent out as new events and activities become available
4. Alarna Moles and Neal Rodwell will review the expressions of interest for bookings and other responses
5. The staff in the rostered shifts will need to ensure that the activities take place.
6. Staff will have access to information to prepare for activities/events
7. These bookings will then need to be honoured by punctuality and commitment and timely apologies if necessary
All members of the management team are available to help with this transition. Call your choice of team member, including the General Manager if you wish, to discuss any details.
The Leadership Team
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Neal Rodwell — General Manager — North West Support Services — 0418 140 000