Residents and staff at Bendigo’s Sandhurst Centre for people with an intellectual disability will benefit from a Department of Human Services’ operational review.

The year-long review looked at residents’ health, recreation and day activity needs for the next five to 10 years—75 per cent of residents at Sandhurst Centre, in Bendigo, are over 40.

It also focused on staff development, recruitment, supervision and training, service delivery, quality assurance and centre maintenance requirements.

The Department’s Disability Services Director Bob Solly launched the review report in December and all recommendations are planned to be implemented by July.

Staff from all work areas of the centre took part in the review project and are involved in working groups to plan and implement the recommendations.

As part of the implementation, Sandhurst unit staff are developing personal health information packages for each resident to ensure GPs—Sandhurst residents have their own local doctors—have the necessary information at the time of consultation.

Unit staff are also monitoring each client’s response to day activities provided away from the centre by local agencies.

Each client’s activities program has been reviewed to include a balanced mixture of active and passive activities.

Staff are accompanying residents to day activities to enhance existing skills and work with residents in a different environment.

Based on feed-back from unit staff, day program activities will be fine-tuned.

During the review, staff developed a simple quality assurance process that links Disability Standards, an audit process and work plans for each residential unit.

The outcome of this process is that each residential unit conducts an audit against the standards and a work plan for the unit is developed as a result.

This enables each residential unit to focus on particular areas that are important to the residents who live in that unit.

The collective results of the unit audit form the basis of the centre’s work plan for the year.