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Industry feedback alert - Call bells

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Dear stakeholder,

Attached for your review is an industry alert on Call Bells. It provides suggestions of areas that aged care providers may wish to review within their service. It should not be considered as advice or as a direction.

You can also access these alerts and other useful resources for effective complaints handling from our new complaint resolution toolkit that’s now available on our website Aged Care Complaints Scheme - Toolkit.

The toolkit draws together information and links to ensure the aged care industry understand their options to give feedback, raise a concern or lodge a complaint.

We encourage you to subscribe to our website to receive an email alert whenever we publish new information on the site. This will also keep you informed when updates are made to the toolkit. To subscribe, enter your email address into the 'Subscribe to updates' box on the right-hand side of the website.

Industry feedback alert - Call bells

From the Office of Aged Care Quality and Compliance (Aged Care Complaints Scheme) - 11 October 2011

Who is this alert for?

All Australian Government subsidised aged care providers who provide call bell services within their facilities.

What is an industry education alert?

Industry education alerts outline an issue, trend or risk we have identified through an analysis of our complaints data, and provide suggestions of areas that aged care providers may wish to review within their service. Alerts are not advice or directions.

Issue

We respond to a number of complaints about call bell response times, often relating to what the complainant considers an inappropriate response time.

We recognise that call bells have two main purposes:

1. answering routine calls for assistance or
2. emergencies, which require urgent and immediate assistance.

Our observations

We reviewed 153 complaints lodged in 2010-11 about call bells.

Our observations are:

• response times vary considerably within and between aged care services, day and night, and on weekends
• there does not appear to be consistency within the industry as to what could be considered reasonable response times
• residents and their families do not differentiate between the two call bell purposes, with some residents/families expecting an immediate response to both.

Suggestions for your consideration

You may want to consider:

• the purpose of call bells within your service
• how accessible and effective the call bells are
• how you differentiate the two purposes, and what constitutes adequate response times in emergency situations and for general care requests
• discussing care recipients’ and their families’ expectations, and how you might address these
• how to help care recipients and their families understand what they can expect.

Aged Care Complaints Branch
Office of Aged Care Quality and Compliance
Email: Aged Care Complaints Communications
Website: Aged Care Complaints Scheme
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