Evaluation of the consumer - directed care initiative - Final Report
8.2 Impact on CDC providers
Table of contents
- Executive summary
- Glossary
1 Introduction- 2 The consumer-directed care initiative
- 3 Evaluation of the consumer-directed care initiative
- 4 Profile of participants and the supports they accessed
- 5 Implementation and operation of the initiative
- 6 Impact of the initiative for CDC participants and their carers
- 7 Impact of the initiative for CDRC participants and the people they care for
8 Impact on providers and the broader service system- 9 Cost assessment and cost-effectiveness of the initiative
- 10 Key findings
- 11 Lessons learnt and strategies for consideration
- Appendices
- References
CDC providers differed in the extent to which they considered that participating in the CDC pilot had changed their ‘culture’. These positions are summarised below.
‘CDC is no different to standard packaged care – our approach is the same’
A number of providers (generally, those that applied the menu-based planning approach) held that CDC in practice was not very different to standard packaged care, and would not change their overall approach. They suggested the main difference was giving the client more choice and provision of the individual budget, and some suggested that these mechanisms could be made available with relative ease under standard care packages if that is what people wanted, rather than having a special CDC package.These providers usually indicated that the CDC experience would not change anything about their approach to standard packaged care, with one main exception. The focus on the individual budget had improved their coordinators’ financial and budgeting skills, and this, along with the budget reporting tools and processes developed for CDC, meant that the organisation was better positioned to be more accountable to their standard care clients. Several providers indicated that they could, on request, use their CDC budget tools to provide more information about costs and expenditure to their standard care clients – but most did not propose to do that as a matter of course.
‘CDC has made some difference to how we think about what is possible’
Some providers still felt that, by and large, CDC was no different from standard packaged care – particularly from the perspective of the participant or carer, and especially so for CDCL participants – but they did acknowledge that CDC had made an impact on the coordinators and managers in terms of their own thinking about ‘what is possible’ on a care package. This relates to more tailored services, informal services, and use of non-traditional supports.These providers appeared to be moving towards the person-centred approach. Some of them had started to change their approach to standard packaged care by being more transparent about services and costs, trying a different approach to planning, and considering the use of individual budgets with some clients.
‘CDC has changed the way we approach standard packaged care’
A small number of providers (those that applied the ‘goal-based’ approach to planning) felt that CDC was fundamentally different because of its enabling, strengths-based approach to planning and delivery of supports. These providers suggested that their CDC experience would most certainly change their approach to standard packaged care clients in two key ways: first, by adopting an enabling approach to planning, and secondly, by focussing on participant and carer goals and framing supports around those.Irrespective of which of these three positions CDC providers took when thinking about the extent to which CDC had influenced their culture, almost all providers agreed that CDC had made them more accountable for the costs of services, including the costs of their own administration and support coordination and management activities.
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