Sarah Newman
General Manager – BaptistCare at home, BaptistCare NSW&ACT
Biography
With a background in Organisational Psychology and L&D, Sarah brings a human-focussed approach to executive leadership of BaptistCare’s rapidly expanding Home Care operations. She is a pragmatist dedicated to ensuring focus on the end goal of improving the lives of those we serve.
Over the past six years Sarah has led BaptistCare at home to significantly expand its delivery of well-informed, multi-disciplinary, holistic care for ageing clients with complex health conditions. She believes passionately in the pivotal role of great care management in delivering outstanding outcomes for clients.
Sarah is the General Manager of BaptistCare at home, one of Australia’s largest Home Care providers. She holds an undergraduate degree in Psychology and a Masters in Applied Social Sciences and Management.
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.