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Australian Unity group executive and chief executive officer of home health Prue Bowden has confirmed to Australian Ageing Agenda that the provider is making the community nurse role redundant – directly impacting over 80 employees.
The decision follows a review into the workforce structure and feedback from home care clients and staff, Ms Bowden said. It was also influenced by the new Support at Home settings, which “have meant you have to think differently around the composition of your workforce,” she added.
The broader change – due to come into effect in early October – will affect approximately 200 existing roles across 53 of the provider’s neighbourhoods and will create 180 new roles, Ms Bowden said.
“Even though roles are impacted, there are a whole lot of new roles that are opened up, and within that 200 we are impacting some of our nurses. It’s actually just above 80 community nurses who’ve been impacted … it’s low 80s. And we’re moving to a retained workforce, around 15 to 20 variable, flexible” roles, she told AAA.
“And the reason for that is we have had historically low utilisation in certain neighbourhoods, particularly in some of the thinner markets and the more regional and remote geographies, and those nurses will have the opportunity to go into clinical care partner roles, which we’ve added more of into the model.”
Ms Bowden described the changes as “a rebalancing of skills and experience,” with the goal of getting more clinicians “at the core” of the business and closer to the customer through care coordination, clinical oversight, deterioration management and care plan management.
She said they believe that having more clinicians sitting in care partnering roles is “really beneficial” for customers and that while the service delivery of nurses in the field is being impacted, Australian Unity is “trying to keep as many of them in these new clinical care partner roles” as it can.
Ms Bowden said there are opportunities for “any clinician who wants to stay with Australian Unity and use their skills but use them in a different way for the betterment of older Australians,” including the virtual nurse role, the triage role and the clinical care partner role.
Ms Bowden emphasised that the changes have been “absolutely informed” by feedback and the lived experience of teams operating under Support at Home, and by the feedback from customers about what they value.
“And at the heart of this, older Australians really value their relationship and connection with the care partner and so we’ve made sure we’re investing in the right capacity,” she told AAA.
“But really importantly the right skill, because this is not an administrative job to do – it is increasingly a clinically-led job to do, which is why we’re making sure that we shift the skill mix so that we can really support customers with more complex needs to live at home.
“And we only need to look at what’s happening in the healthcare system to know that there are more comorbidities, more dementia, and having more clinicians at the centre of your business in these care partnering roles will make a material difference.”
“This is just a rebalancing of skills and it’s making sure that we’re able to fully utilise all of our workforce in the regions that we operate in and so we’ve taken a very region-by-region view around what utilisation we need and what capacities and skills that we need – but it’s about doubling down and building a model that really delivers the right outcomes and the right quality care to our customers,” she said.
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