Carina Robinson
Strategy and Innovation Manager, BaptistCare NSW&ACT
Biography
Carina is a strategic leader with over 20 years’ of experience in health and social care, where she spent a decade in client facing roles before transitioning to teaching and senior leadership. Carina has contributed to the design of health and community services qualifications as a member of the national Technical Advisory Committee for Case Management and founding Chair of the National Technical and Further Education Commission Aged Care Taskforce. She is a Fellow and Certified Practicing Case Manager with the Case Management Society of Australia, Associate Fellow with the Australasian College of Health Service Management, Chair of ACCPA’s NSW/ACT Home and Community Care Forum and was an Ambassador with LASA’s NextGen Program.
Carina currently leads Strategy and Innovation with one of Australia’s largest home care providers, BaptistCare at home.
The Art of Care Management: Deciphering the black box of home care’s most complex service and implications for system design.
Home Care reform foreshadows significant change for care management services in Australia. High quality care management is broadly acknowledged as fundamental in optimising outcomes for older people, as well as being a key enabler of wider system benefits. However many of the activities of care management are hidden from view, or spread across a variety of roles, securing its place as the mysterious black box of home care delivery.
The Australian Government is proposing sweeping changes to the way care management will be funded and delivered in the future. Home care providers and government alike have been hindered by a lack of standardised approaches, terminology and workforce skilling to scaffold the delivery of care management services for older people living in the community. This has resulted in limited shared understanding between funding bodies, policy makers, service users and service providers about the potential benefits care management offers to individuals, populations and the broader health and social care systems.
BaptistCare has strongly advocated that quality care management is crucial in delaying decline, preserving independence, and helping older people remain living at home. We continue to call for policy and pricing that authentically reflect the true value and range of care management activities undertaken by home care providers. In a positive step forward, policy makers are now looking to providers for more insight, giving a valuable opportunity to influence the future model. However, there is currently very limited information about what these activities look like in practice, how long they take and the skills of those providing them.
To help fill this gap, in August 2023 BaptistCare at home completed a care management study including all multidisciplinary employees contributing skills and expertise to the care management process. Information was collected through a Workforce Skills Survey and a time-task data capture where employees were asked to self-report daily care management activity for a two-week period.
In this session we provide an overview of our deep dive analysis of care management practice within one of Australia’s largest home care providers, the significance of the findings, and implications both for the future of home care design and in optimising our organisational readiness to successfully transition to the new model in July 2025.