Accrediting every aged care home in Australia: Aged Care Quality Agency
The Quality Agency accredited every residential aged care home in the country and reviewed home care services. We ran its website for seven years, and built its forms on something the agency could change itself.
The agency
The Australian Aged Care Quality Agency accredits residential aged care homes and reviews home care services across the country. Its assessors visit every home at least once a year unannounced, and speak with about 50,000 residents a year about the care they are getting.
What the site carries
Most of it is for providers, and most of that is procedural: the accreditation standards and the legislation under them, what an unannounced visit involves, how a review audit works, what happens when a home fails to meet the standards, how to respond to an assessment team's report, and how to ask for a reconsideration or an appeal. People read this material when something is at stake for them, so it has to be easy to find and hard to misread.
There is a public side: how to complain about a home, and what privacy and confidentiality mean for the person complaining. And a workforce side: education programs, one-day workshops, the Better Practice conferences and awards, a continuing professional development search, an assessor register, and recruitment.
Finding your way through it
A regulator's website is mostly navigation. The material is not hard to write; it is hard to arrange, because the person reading it is a provider mid-audit or a family member with a complaint, and neither of them knows the agency's internal structure. We ran card sorting sessions to settle the information architecture, so the sections follow how people look for things rather than how the agency is organised.
Forms the agency can change
The work runs on forms, and the forms change as the standards and the processes change. We built them on Plomino, an application builder that runs inside Plone, so adding a field is something the agency's own staff can do rather than a change request to us. That is the reason for choosing it. A regulator's forms follow its legislation, and legislation moves.
Running it
We host, support and maintain the site under a service level agreement.
What this involved
The website of the national regulator that accredits every residential aged care home in Australia
Card sorting to settle the information architecture, so the sections match how people look for things
Accreditation standards, legislation, audits, unannounced visits and the appeals path, published for providers
A public complaints path, with privacy and confidentiality set out for the person complaining
Education programs, Better Practice conferences and awards, and a continuing professional development search
An assessor register and recruitment
Forms built on Plomino, so the agency can add fields itself as the standards change
Hosting, support and maintenance under a service level agreement