Policy and Research

CareSouth’s Policy & Research unit work to support the organisation’s practice by advancing our Key Success Factor 1: Research Education and Evidence. During the year, the team of five part-time staff worked on:

• supporting the CEO in planning, service modelling, sector advocacy and tendering,
• organisational policy,
• knowledge translation,
• capacity building across outcomes and impact thinking,
• the CareSouth Practice Framework,
• Safeguarding Children, Young People and People with Disability, through the Australian Childhood Foundation Accreditation program, and
• scoping the progression of the CareSouth Research Agenda.

Supporting good practice through evidence

Bringing research and evidence to our busy professionals at the frontline of program work has been an important focus for Policy & Research. We have introduced a new bi-monthly serial publication, CareSouth Practice Briefs, and four of these were published during the year. Research snapshots were also prepared on an ad hoc basis, responding to individual program needs.

We continued to build and classify our Practice Library of articles and resources, to assist staff to keep up to date with new research and reports, and posted regular updates about new research through the CareSouth Intranet and blog pages.

In December 2016, a part-time Research Officer, Rebecca Coddington, was appointed, to support our knowledge translation and dissemination activities.

Outcome-focused practice

Program evaluations and outcomes assessment are another important source of evidence for building best practice, helping our programs to better understand how the work we do helps to improve lives. Over the year, Policy & Research committed to building a stronger impact-focus across CareSouth, with team level discussions about program logic and theories of change held throughout the year. A simple, consistent framework for thinking about impact was introduced. This has greatly assisted us to grow our knowledge and focus in this area.

Karen Wilcox presented papers on advancing outcomes thinking and practice at the ACWA state conference in Sydney in August 2016, and at the Think Outcomes national conference in Sydney in May 2017. Karen also completed a Social Return on Investment outcomes assessment for the Homework Hub.

Supporting good practice through our policy system

The major overhaul and development of CareSouth’s policies and procedures, which commenced last year, continued throughout this year. Priorities for the Policy team of Kate Senior and Alison Oyston (and for a short time, Ross James) were dictated by three major external accreditation audits; for disability services, our SYSS program and our Out-of-Home Care programs. Many whole of organisation policies were also added to our suite or redeveloped in light of standards introduced by the accreditation bodies. A total of 126 new documents were released during the year. Our policy suite frames our practice across all areas of service delivery, as well as supporting governance, reducing risk and regulating operations. The CareSouth Policy Management System aims to be amongst the most robust in the sector, driving the highest quality of practice.

Access to policies and procedures for all staff was greatly improved with the completion of the Policy Database Project, which provided a ‘keyword searchable’ platform for documents. The Policy team also undertook a stocktake and audit of forms and scoped the development of a document control system incorporating consistent, current form templates, which has now been advanced through the work of Rebecca Tickner in the Compliance team.