Presenter: Jen Engels
12 October 2022
Welcome everyone. My name is Jen Engels and I'll be presenting How to use the Concordance Table, as part of our Residential Aged Care NDIS Registration series of videos.
So, the Concordance Table has been developed as one of a number of tools as part of the Residential Aged Care Toolkit. It's an optional tool but it may assist you during your self-assessment and also as an ongoing continuous improvement tool. So, whilst it's certainly not compulsory we recommend you go and take a look.
So, the tool can help you to identify how your existing residential aged care policies and procedures and other evidence meet the quality indicators of the NDIS Practice Standards. So, basically it's a bit like completing a document review or a gap analysis. So, each quality indicator of the NDIS Practice Standards has been colour-coded to identify if those requirements are the same, or have similarities or are different to aged care requirements. You'll see there's a little bit of a scale at the bottom of the screen where we have similar which is in green, some similarities in yellow and different in red and you can read the relevant definitions to all of those ratings in that scale. That scale is also duplicated you'll find that in the Concordance Table itself for quick and easy access.
So, here's what the Concordance Table looks like. The only difference is you will find the Concordance Table is an excel document. But it has four primary columns, the column to the left is where the NDIS Practice Standards and Outcomes are listed. The next column over includes the NDIS Quality Indicators and these quality indicators are the ones that are colour coded to the scale of similar some similarities or different.
In the third column, this is where you get to write down the evidence that you already have in place. So, this evidence may be one or more documents, it might be a series of documents or records that together contribute to meeting the quality indicator. So, it doesn't necessarily have to be just one thing and similarly you might find that you have certain documents within your system that go across a whole range of NDIS Quality Indicators.
The last column is a space for you to write down actions and I'll come to that the next slide.
So, we would suggest that you have a look at the Concordance Table and work through each quality indicator by documenting the types of evidence that you have in place for each quality indicator. At this stage, you may also like to have a look at the Evidence Guide and there's a video also in this series on another tool called the Evidence Guide. You will need to document evidence for additional rules that are called up under the NDIS Practice Standards and will need to be complied with. For example, these rules are feedback and complaints and Incident Management.
And lastly, in the actions column, so the column that was furthest to the right. This is a space for you to record the actions that you will need to undertake to uh develop, or review, or update evidence in which to meet the standards. So, you may find that you might need to develop a new process. Or you might find that you need to tweak a procedure, or whatever it is this is where you can write down those actions and maybe who's the best person to do those actions as well.
Where the NDIS requirements are similar to aged care requirements then it's likely that your existing evidence is okay. So, you will still need to show the audit team that evidence but it is likely that it's going to be okay without having to change much, if anything. So again, if you need to update or develop new evidence it is good to refer to that Evidence Guide in the toolkit for ideas.
The results of the Concordance Table can also be used to inform your self-assessment. So, if you're in a position to, we'd recommend having a look at the Concordance Table and working through that prior to undertaking your self-assessment and then the results of that Concordance Table can then be easily copied over to your self-assessment within the Commission's system.
The Concordance Table is also great to show audit team members exactly where your evidence is located and what you have. Another good thing about the Concordance Table, as a tool is, once it's complete it will help to keep you focused on NDIS requirements moving forward. So, what that means is sometimes systems can stray away from standards unintentionally but with the Concordance Table you can always make sure that you're meeting the requirements of the Quality Indicators and NDIS Practice Standards and it's a good tool for continuous improvement.
So, we hope this video has been useful.