Meeting Action 2.9.5 of the Strengthened Aged Care Standards is essential — not just for compliance but also as a critical step in addressing staff attraction and retention.

Action 2.9.4

Before delving into Action 2.9.5, let’s examine Action 2.9.4.

Key Terms in Action 2.9.4 and 2.9.5

The Glossary within the Strengthened Standards does not include the key terms in 2.9.4 and 2.9.5. So, let’s start by defining them.

What is a “Training System”?

A training system could encompass the processes and policies an organisation has in place for planning, scheduling, assigning, evaluating, and reporting on education. It might include a Learning Management System (LMS) or a workforce capability platform. Given that Actions sit within the human resource section of Standard 2: The Organisation, let’s assume that the Commission is encouraging us to consider a training system from the provider or organisation’s personnel in this particular instance.

We cannot exclude the learner's experience from our evaluation or quest to improve effectiveness. Even the greatest LMS that functions perfectly well for HR or L&D may not be effective if it is not designed with the learner’s needs, environment or learning experience in mind. No training and education will be completed if it always has to be completed on a desktop or disengages because it does not meet the diverse workforce’s multilingual and multicultural learners' needs.

What are “Training Strategies"?

Training strategies refer to the diverse set of activities, initiatives, and programs an organisation develops and rolls out to improve staff capabilities. Training strategies are delivered through various methods and formats to engage and educate staff effectively, depending on the goal and learning outcomes of the strategy. For example:

What are "Skills"?

Skills refer to the specific abilities required to perform job tasks effectively. These can be technical (e.g., clinical care procedures such as taking vital signs, documenting assessments or showering a client) or professional skills (e.g., communication, teamwork, handling a complaint).

What are "Qualifications"?

Qualifications are formal certifications or degrees that validate a person's ability to perform their job roles. This includes credentials from educational institutions (e.g., a Bachelor of Nursing) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses, such as a Certificate III in Individual Support (Ageing).

What are "Competencies"?

Let’s start by considering what it means to be “competent”. According to Donna Wright, competency is demonstrated through showing, demonstrating, or verifying knowledge, skills, behaviours or abilities in real-world settings.

​​Competencies combine skills, knowledge, and behaviours that enable individuals to perform their roles effectively. A qualified assessor often formally assesses and signs off on competencies to ensure that staff members can perform them to the required standard in a real-world scenario. A competency verification process may involve practical demonstrations, observed performance, various assessments or uploading of evidence to demonstrate and verify that individuals meet the necessary criteria for competence.

We’ve defined the key terms, so let’s unpack the other elements in 2.9.4.

Training Draws on the Experience of Older People

Incorporating the experiences of older people when creating training strategies prioritises person-centred care. This approach acknowledges that the quality of care in aged care facilities is not solely determined by providers but also by the residents' overall quality of life and lived experiences.

Here are two practical, evidence-based approaches L&D teams can take to draw on the invaluable insights of older people:

1. Co-designing education with residents themselves.

Andrea Waring, Quality and Risk Manager at CareXcell shared a simple yet meaningful example: new staff members must have tea with a resident during their induction process. This simple act allows for genuine conversation and connection, enabling new staff to understand the resident's perspective from the outset. Additionally, Andrea invited residents to present education sessions, integrating their experiences into onboarding new staff. Listen to the full episode here for more inspiring examples.

2. Integrating outcome measures into needs assessments.

The National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (QI Program) requires residential aged care services to collect data on quality care areas, resident experiences, and satisfaction. L&D teams can use this data to validate training needs in tandem with direct resident feedback. Furthermore, the quality data acts as an evaluation metric and can be used to measure the effectiveness of educational interventions by comparing pre- and post-training data.

Responsive to Feedback and Performance Reviews

An effective training system must respond to feedback, complaints, incidents, and performance reviews. However, it's crucial to approach this with a nuanced understanding that more than education is needed for all organisational issues.

Conducting a thorough needs assessment in the planning phase will identify and validate with data a clear need for training, education, or other relevant initiatives to mitigate clinical risks, such as high-prevalence, high-impact events. The best practice is to use education and training to address specific feedback, complaints, incidents, and identified risks when there is a validated need.

1. Focus on addressing root causes while using targeted training to fill specific gaps.
2. Using training and education wisely, to address educational gaps only will save time and resources and contribute to a positive learning culture.

Unpacking Action 2.9.5

Who’s Responsibility is Action 2.9.5?

Who should regularly review and improve the effectiveness of the training system? It's not as simple as assigning this task to the L&D team. While the L&D team should be heavily involved, they need a direct reporting line to the governing body. This connection ensures that the governing body overseeing workforce skills, qualifications, and experience is fully informed. L&D cannot operate in isolation; their data and insights must be shared. This also helps L&D teams effectively communicate the link between education initiatives and their outcomes.

What Constitutes “Regularly”

The term "regularly" is defined as "occurring at recurring intervals" (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, page 55). However, the specific interval should be determined for each case. For practical purposes, let’s consider a minimum of at least annually.

What Does "Review” Mean?

A formal review process includes several steps. Here’s a breakdown:

Are these steps relevant and practical for your situation? Probably not. Let’s keep working through the action in our quest to create a framework to meet this requirement.

How Should We “Improve Effectiveness?”

We could look to a validated evaluation model to evaluate training and education strategies to identify how to improve effectiveness. For example, the New World Kirkpatrick model evaluates training across four levels:

Simplifying Action 2.9.5!

Defining the key terms will at least assist with how we think about Action 2.5 by now. But we’re still lacking something measurable. Can we draw on other industries? Every sector, every company, and every CEO undertakes a process to review and improve the effectiveness of a core aspect of the product and service, right?

What Does the Aviation Industry Do?

How do airlines review and assess the performance of their engines to ensure efficiency? Ultimately it comes down to a performance metric of “passenger miles per litre of fuel”. Therefore, any effort to impact this number will be deemed effective. For example, reducing the aircraft's weight, improving the aircraft routes to avoid unnecessary stopovers, or replacing engines as new, more efficient technologies emerge, etc.

What Does the Freight and Transportation Industry Do?

Freight companies obsess over “average freight cost per km” or “average freight cost per tonne.” Good performance metrics help employees identify ways to reduce costs and increase performance while also being wary of decisions that may increase costs. For example, a delivery driver who makes fewer stops and shorter trips will deliver more parcels in a shorter period of time, hence a lower average freight cost per tonne.

These examples show that a company can increase its profit margin by focusing on specific metrics. Read more about Profit per X in ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins.

Establishing Performance Metrics for Training Systems

I asked Ausmed’s CEO, Will Egan, how he thinks about performance. How does he know one of our key products, the Ausmed LMS, is effective? Does he have a mental model he uses to assess if what we are creating is effective? What metrics does he use to evaluate performance? Here’s what he said.

We think about the term effectiveness in two ways:

1. Most importantly, does the education lead to the desired outcome or change in behaviour?
2. Was the education administered in an effective way?

Regarding item two, we tend to take an engineering approach to this question. For us, an effective administration system enables organisations to:

• Deliver a high number of learning outcomes,
• With a high average completion or compliance rate,
• For the largest number of staff (workforce),
• At the lowest cost (which we measure as L&D FTE).

For example, if a provider were able to deliver 34 learning outcomes, with an average compliance rate of 80%, for 5,000 staff with a 0.2 FTE in L&D per 1000 staff managed, this would mean one L&D professional can manage 170,000 training requirements for 5,000 staff whilst maintaining an 80% compliance rate before any interventions are required.

Ultimately, to determine the effectiveness of any system, we simply need to ask how much of the “work” the system does before a human is required to intervene.

Applying the Mental Model Beyond Action 2.9.5

The strengthened aged care quality standards specifically require providers to regularly monitor and review not just their training system but also their quality system , digital clinical information system and risk management system. By applying these principles to all critical systems, providers can create a robust framework for continuous improvement, fostering a culture of excellence and accountability throughout the organisation.

Regular review and improvement of training systems are crucial for maintaining high standards of care in aged care. Governing bodies, particularly CEOs and Boards, will benefit from a simple mental model to understand the return on investment they are making in training and building workforce capability and if it is achieving the desired organisational goals.

References and resources

For more information, you can refer to the following resources:

• Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission - Strengthening Provider Governance
• The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards – Final Draft

Author

Zoe Youl 

Zoe Youl is a Critical Care Registered Nurse with over ten years of experience at Ausmed, currently as Head of Community. With expertise in critical care nursing, clinical governance, education and nursing professional development, she has built an in-depth understanding of the educational and regulatory needs of the Australian healthcare sector.

As the Accredited Provider Program Director (AP-PD) of the Ausmed Education Learning Centre, she maintains and applies accreditation frameworks in software and education. In 2024, Zoe lead the Ausmed Education Learning Centre to achieve Accreditation with Distinction for the fourth consecutive cycle with the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s (ANCC) Commission on Accreditation. The AELC is the only Australian provider of nursing continuing professional development to receive this prestigious recognition.

Zoe holds a Master's in Nursing Management and Leadership, and her professional interests focus on evaluating the translation of continuing professional development into practice to improve learner and healthcare consumer outcomes. From 2019-2022, Zoe provided an international perspective to the workgroup established to publish the fourth edition of Nursing Professional Development Scope & Standards of Practice. Zoe was invited to be a peer reviewer for the 6th edition of the Core Curriculum for Nursing Professional Development.