Rostering and Care Minutes under AN-ACC course

By Taranjot Minhas, Senior Consultant

In our work with over 40 providers on their transition to AN-ACC, we have noticed the sector is generally missing the link between funding and care minutes that are opposite sides of the scales that need to be continually kept in balance. Being unable to do balance these two sides will result in periods of over expenditure or poor compliance outcomes and this balance is now fundamental to ensuring sustainable businesses that deliver on expectations of the residents in their care, their families, communities, and government combined. 

To ensure this sustainability, forward thinking aged care providers are embracing scenario planning as part of their rostering practices. Scenario planning is a strategic decision-making process that involves exploring various plausible future outcomes. The process typically starts with identifying different factors that could have an impact on the activity in future. Based on these factors, scenarios can be developed – often representing baseline, best-case and worst-case future states.  

Specifically in aged care, by creating “what-if” scenarios, providers can model various staffing situations based on fluctuating resident numbers, staff availability, and now changes in care minute targets. This enables the provider to identify potential staffing gaps or overstaffing instances and make data-driven decisions to ensure optimal staff allocation. 

Once developed, providers can create response plans to these scenarios. This provides much more certainty in a world where the future is unknown or unpredictable. Applied to workforce planning and rostering, scenario planning and analysis is a powerful tool that allows CFOs and HR managers to navigate this complexity with confidence. It provides a much clearer picture over future workforce costs and resource needs and offers significant advantages, beyond simply publishing the same roster every pay period. 

“The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression.” 

John Harvey Jones 

We are conscious that the ideal process in this new world of aged care is not easy to understand, and even harder to achieve, when providers are already busy with business-as-usual activities.  

To help with the understanding, Mirus Australia is launching our own Rostering and Care Minute under AN-ACC course through our Academy – for rostering teams and senior managers at each facility to gain a thorough understanding of the new aged care landscape, as well as practical exercises in scenario planning. With the first course available from 11^th October 2023, we’re passionate about educating and empowering the sector to get ahead of the curve and ensure efficient, transparent and sustainable rostering practices for sustainable aged care businesses. 

To help with the achieving, our co-designed technology solutions help to streamline processes and reduce the sector’s precious staff’s time and work requirements. Providers working with us have already seen better flow of data and information between teams by improvement of their systems such as rostering platforms that provide costed care minute data in real-time and track against targets (like Mirus Works!) and a funding application to manage AN-ACC transaction-level data (like Mirus Metrics). 

But now we’ve gone one step further. We have listened to providers’ concerns about the logistics of quickly putting care minutes into practice and created Care Minute Manager. Care Minute Manager connects seamlessly with your existing rostering software to give you a daily view on care minute targets so that you can meet your goals. You do not have to change your current rostering solution, making Care Minute Manager an affordable addition to your existing technology infrastructure. Plus, it takes very little time to set up. With a standardised reporting template, you’ll be able to use your real-time data to fulfil your Quarterly Financial Report care minutes data on the hours worked. 

So, what are you doing to ensure you meet the mandatory care minute requirements at your facility?

If you would like to have a chat about how we can assist you with managing your care minutes, please contact us today.