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Covid-19 Key things to help you everyday

The ongoing impact of COVID is real….for residents and you

In nearly every reach out in our customer care calls to DCMI program Members over the last month there has been deep concern for your resident and team mental health. 

With Sydney well into its tenth week of lockdown, Melbourne on lockdown 6.0 and other states never knowing when the short snap lockdowns may occur, we are hearing more and more stories of exhaustion, worry, despair, anxiousness, and so many more feelings coming to a head.   

Real COVID impacts

These stories, rightly so, often start with concern for resident mental health as village professionals listen to resident’s sharing:

  • The impact of lockdown on their own physical health
  • The inability to connect with others
  • Unsure of when they may see family and friends   
  • Missing important milestones
  • Challenges of speaking & listening through a mask 
  • Not being able to give or receive family support
  • Missing that personal touch; and  
  • In some cases the ability to attend or continue with medical treatments/reviews   

You have shared with us the obvious and visible signs these impacts are having on resident mental health.  

How COVID can impact you

On top of these concerns, you are juggling the added worries about COVID coming into your village, keeping up with the ever-changing restrictions, implementing new legislative requirements whilst managing COVID and trying to have a plan to address the increasing non-essential maintenance that has had to be delayed. 

We have seen increased feelings of isolation, managing constantly changing and differing resident expectations, and of course your concern for residents declining during this time. 

Your oxygen mask

Hearing these stories reminded us of all of the great support tools that are out there to help support your residents, your teams and so very importantly yourselves. 

You will know the old saying “you need to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can help others” in my experience it is so true.  

There are some great resources out there to help in these times and here are a couple that come to mind:

Perhaps check out the great advice and tools available at Beyond Blue specifically the webinar below developed for Retirement Village residents and teams, which we had some input.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLTu8Kz-Zo4&t=2s

There are also a number of great tips from The Black Dog Institute in dealing with the impact of COVID on mental health in this article –
10 tips for managing anxiety during COVID-19 – Black Dog Institute  

Or perhaps schedule sometime to grab a cuppa and reach out to a colleague (even if you have to do it on zoom). Chances are you are both feeling the same way and sometimes a problem shared is also a problem halved…  

We are thinking of you.

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Things to watch

‘A Life Changing Life’ Campaign on your TV soon to attract new staff

https://mumbrella.com.au/new-aus-gov-campaign-from-mc-saatchi-looks-to-encourage-a-career-in-carer-roles-698620?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=READ%20MORE%20%C2%BB&utm_campaign=Mumbrella%20Daily%20-%2017%2F08%2F21

The Australian Government has launched a new campaign to raise awareness around the employment opportunities in the care sector, especially home care.

The ‘A Life Changing Life’ campaign, tells the stories of real care and support workers, and the people they support.

It’s great!

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Key things to help you everyday Latest industry developments

‘Mediate, before it escalates!’: specialised Seniors mediation service launches

Ever wondered if you could call in a mediation service to break the ice? Now you can.

As we recently reported in The SOURCE, three industry experts, with combined 50 years industry experience, have unveiled a new mediation service for Retirement Villages, Manufactured Home Parks and Aged Care Facilities. 

Senior Living Mediation (SLM) aims to provide practical, cost effective and efficient dispute resolution solutions for operators, park owners, residents and homeowners throughout the country. 

“At SLM we share a genuine belief in the benefit of community living and a desire to help create and maintain harmonious communities,” said Aileen Stewart, SLM’s codirector and founder. “Mediate, before it escalates! is the catch cry of SLM and it could not be more true”. 

“SLM has facilitated the resolution of several long-running disputes in Queensland and New South Wales, reaching a successful resolution in an under a day,” said Ms Stewart. 

SLM’s practical mediation solutions are in keeping with values and principles of the Retirement Living Code of Conduct and are conducive with the ‘facilitative mediation’ model. 

Pictured: Senior Living Mediation’s lawyer Danielle Lim, Complaints Specialist in Land Lease Communities Gillian Moore and former TriCare Operations Manager Aileen Stewart. 

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Things to watch

“Village leadership in a post pandemic world”

https://youtu.be/qXYLg6oyP-Q

Matt Church CEO, Thought Leaders

One of the most awarded conference speakers in Australia, Matt has been recognised as one of the Top 10 motivational speakers globally.

Matt is the Founder of Thought Leaders and writer of 13 books, including his latest Rise Up: An evolution in leadership.

Invest in your team. Invest in your future.

We invite you to join with your team at this significant Village Management event.

Click here to register as our guest or a delegate.

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Uncategorized

You are invited to VILLAGE SUMMIT 2021 as our guest

How long will the COVID lockdown last – until end October most say.

This is why we will be in your city in November and December for our one day VILLAGE SUMMIT 2021. It may be the first opportunity to bring you and your village management team together – which would be a great experience.

We expect over 600 delegates and don’t forget all Members of our DCM Institute are invited to attend as our guests. 

Perth 11 Nov   Crown Perth
Adel   19 Nov   Crowne Plaza
Bris    26 Nov   Hilton
Melb  30 Nov   Crowne Plaza
Syd     2 Dec     Hyatt Regency

In each city we are delivering some of Australia’s top motivational, leadership and business speakers to you in your city, including Matt Church, ranked in the Top 10 motivational speakers worldwide.

This year’s VILLAGE SUMMIT is our thanks to you after a challenging 2021.

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Key things to help you everyday

Burnout in Village Management

This week our DCM Editor Lauren Broomham penned a very important edition of SATURDAY, focusing on Burnout across the Age Services sectors. 

Of particular interest was the article on Burnout in Village Professionals. If you aren’t a subscriber to SATURDAY you can read the full article here. 

At DCMI stories of burnout, and worries about staff burnout, is something that is shared with members of our team on a regular basis. 

It is something I have spent considerable time pondering the solution. I know it would be naïve to think there is a one size fits all solution. The solutions are many, and will vary from village to village, operator to operator.

Below I have shared just a few for consideration:   

  • Opportunity for frequent uninterrupted breaks from village responsibilities  
     
  • Additional resource support for establishment of new process, regulation, accreditation compliance etc 
     
  • Providing clear policy and procedure guidelines 
     
  • Solutions for ageing residents and resident behaviour management 
     
  • Extra customer relations/administration support in larger villages 
     
  • Technology solutions for communications and operations
     
  • Regular senior executive visits to villages  
     
  • Reasonable pay for effort 
     
  • Clear authorisation/delegation guidelines, and
       
  • Of course, my passion – ensuring Village professionals participate regularly in professional development and industry networking opportunities  

However, I do believe there is something as a sector we can unite on: “ACKNOWLEDGING THE VALUE & IMPORTANCE of VILLAGE PROFESSIONALS” not only to the village, the team, the residents, our sector and importantly society!    

“You can always tell a good Village Manager by the way the village smiles at you as you enter”. 

After all they are responsible for the first impressions at the village gate! 

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Latest industry developments Things to watch

NZ operators take up DCM Institute village management professional development program

The New Zealand Retirement Villages Association has joint ventured with us to take our ongoing professional development program to New Zealand operators.​

DCM CEO Chris Baynes and I presented the joint initiative at the RVA National Conference in Auckland. Judy Martin and Jill Donaldson also flew across for the launch.

In New Zealand, operators have invested significantly in building trust within the community, together with Government and the peak resident’s association.

In January, the RVA and the Retirement Villages Residents Association of New Zealand (RVRANZ) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), committing to closer collaboration and co-operation.

https://www.tearainstitute.co.nz/

The establishment of professional development for retirement village management has been a major objective of residents for some time. The RVA Education Committee identified that the DCM Institute program delivered the content, structure and proven participation, and it was a better solution to bring DCMI to New Zealand than attempt to build from scratch.

They identified that as little as 10% of the content requires “Kiwi-ising’.

You are most probably amongst the 350+ village executives now enrolled here in Australia.

It is with your participation and feedback that has allowed us to build DCMI into what it is today, and we must say it’s very rewarding to be recognised by our New Zealand friends who in many areas lead the world in retirement living operations and support of residents.

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Things to watch

62% of sales from referrals!!!

Last month I caught up with my great colleague Linda Hooper, National marketing manager with Living Choice, who happened to mention in passing that they had achieved 62% of sales from referrals…

An amazing result by any businesses standard!  So I asked her to elaborate a little more and what I uncovered was a well thought out targeted strategy, synonymous to Living Choices marketing, that is delivering REAL results!

https://www.tearainstitute.co.nz/

In the retirement living industry, there is nothing more satisfying that seeing the word “Referral” as the advertising source when receiving an enquiry for a village. It’s a powerful validation of not just your marketing team’s efforts but all those who work for the company.

Across the retirement living sector, the incidence of referral is quite low. In our sister company DCM Research’s National resident survey of over 4,000 village residents last year, they found that strong referrals only occurred in 13% of cases. See below.

When Linda first joined Living Choice, they were spending an awful lot of money on traditional advertising, such as print, TV and radio. While this generated a lot of leads, the cost of converting that lead to a settlement was alarmingly high. She soon identified that the referrals, however, had a much higher conversion rate.

Linda with the wider Living Choice team implemented a Referral Reward Program whereby both referrers and those they refer receive a gift voucher on settlement.

While this is a nice “thank-you” present, Linda doesn’t believe it is the main reason for the referral at all – it is just one piece of the Living Choice promise.

Moving into a retirement village is a major decision and people won’t refer a family member or friend unless they are convinced the village ticks a number of important boxes.

In addition to the gift vouchers, Living Choice holds a Gala Reward Event to thank the referrers, those they have referred plus their many resident helpers. They invest considerable marketing funds into these glamorous events and for both residents and the team, these are a highlight on the marketing calendar.

Over the years, the percentage of settlements attributed to referrals has grown to a current 62% of all sales! It’s a percentage that not just the marketing team but all Living Choice staff members and residents can be proud of.

Linda shares “these results also keep the team united and focused on ensuring we deliver on our promise and the best possible lifestyle and care for residents”. 

Multiple research programs confirm that well over 90% of residents are positively satisfied by their move – as demonstrated from this graph from the same DCM research program last year – it would be great if we can mobilise these satisfied residents!

Categories
Latest industry developments Things to watch What the research tells us

Planning ahead – the number of home care providers is about to collapse

Here is something to put in the back of your mind. Our DCM group colleague Chris Baynes is giving a webinar presentation today for 200 IT executives in the aged care space about the reforms from the Royal Commission and the impact it will have on home care and residential care.

He is proposing that the number of home care providers will collapse over the next three years. Some commentators are saying that over 700 providers could be reduced to as few as 50.

https://www.tearainstitute.co.nz/

The implications for village operators is that the remaining big suppliers will be far more powerful in negotiating to what level they will support village operators in marketing home care as a given support service in a village.

From the chart above, you can see that the 16 largest home care providers have 47% of the Home Care Packages while the 562 small home care providers have just 15% of the Packages.

The Royal Commission reforms require operators to have significantly stronger back office IT and workforce training and oversight. The smaller operators are unlikely to have the cash to make these investments.

At the same time, the home care workforce is likely to be attracted to the higher wages and culture that big operators will be able to offer with the efficiencies and easy technology they will be introducing.

Chris’ advice: keep an eye on your local home care providers and build relationships with the operators that you feel most comfortable with the quality of service but also are most likely to survive.

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Key things to help you everyday

Is your village information safe?

Last month when I was in New Zealand, the news of the day was how three public hospitals had their digital systems and patient information hacked, staff were effectively locked out of their digital systems and the Government were potentially being held to ransom.

This got me to thinking about the various digital solutions I have seen around the country in villages and what would the impact be to a village if suddenly their digital system was hacked, they were locked out, the resident information shared publicly or even worse held to ransom.

​Only two laptops safe

It also reminded me of an experience I had at the LEADERS SUMMIT in Adelaide in March where the ComwireIT General Manager, Nathan showed us on his laptop that there were about 140 devices in the conference room but only TWO of them were secure, the rest leaving themselves open to a potential cyber threat.  

Cyber attacks can:

  • Cause significant downtime for your business
  • Expose your intellectual property to the public or your competitors
https://www.tearainstitute.co.nz/
  • Expose your client’s private information to the public
  • Require submission of a Notifiable Data Breach to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner

All these things can have a dramatic impact on your day-to-day operations, your brand and depending upon your internal support systems can cost serious money to rectify.

Simple questions

Nathan also asked us a few questions:

  • Where is your data stored? If on a local server, do you complete regular backups?
  • Do you have a Disaster Recovery plan?
  • If it’s stored in the cloud, is it based in Australia or offshore?
  • Who has access to your data?
  • What type of authentication do you have to access your systems?
  • Does your IT roadmap address all these variables?

Nathan clearly saw the shock on our faces and shared with me a few weeks later the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Essential Eight mitigation strategies to reduce exposure to a cyber-attack:

  • 3rd Party Application Patches need to be managed to reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities
  • Operating System Patches need to be managed
  • Daily backups are a must
  • Application Whitelisting/Anti-Virus management
  • Configuration of Microsoft Office macro settings
  • Review user application hardening
  • Restriction of administrative privileges
  • Implementation of Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Now if you are like me and would like to know some simple solutions for your workplace, click here to download ComwireIT Cyber Security ‘Keep your workplace safe’ checklist. 

Alternatively, if you would like to take it a step further to obtain an audit of your digital environment or add to your IT Roadmap, contact ComwireIT.