Assessment Officer – Serious Incident Response Scheme (Sirs)

About the Commission: 

The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (the Commission) was formed on 1 January 2019. The role of the Commission is to protect and enhance the safety, health, wellbeing and quality of life of people receiving aged care.

The Commission is the national end-to-end regulator of aged care services and the primary point of contact for consumers and providers in relation to quality and safety. Our vision is to support a world-class aged care system driven by empowered consumers who enjoy the best possible quality of life.

We aim to build confidence and trust in aged care, empower consumers, promote best practice service provision, promote quality standards and hold providers to account for their performance against the expected standards of care. We seek to promote an aged care system that develops safer systems of care, inculcates a culture of safety and quality, and learns from mistakes, while providing the oversight that can assure the community that aged care services are operating as they should, including working on continuous improvement.

About our team:

The SIRS is an initiative to help prevent and reduce the risk and occurrence of incidents of abuse and neglect of older Australians receiving Commonwealth-subsidised aged care and services. It commenced in residential aged care on 1 April 2021 and was extended to home services on 1 December 2022.

The SIRS has 2 key components:

• incident management responsibilities
• reportable incident obligations.

The 8 types of reportable incidents that must be reported to the Commission include:

• Unreasonable use of force 
• Unlawful sexual contact or inappropriate sexual conduct 
• Psychological or emotional abuse 
• Stealing or financial coercion by a staff member 
• Neglect 
• Inappropriate use of restrictive practices
• Unexplained absence from care / missing consumers 
• Unexpected death.

The aim of SIRS is to:

• build the capability of providers to prevent or reduce the occurrence of Serious Incidents and improve quality and safety
• require providers to review incident information to drive improvements in quality and safety
• enable the Commission to better detect, triage and respond to risk across all its functions by utilising SIRS notifications alongside the range of intelligence held by the Commission. 

SIRS team delivers on the aim by:

• assessing the actual or potential risk to the safety, health, wellbeing and quality of life of a consumer and provider capacity and capability to address the risk 
• acting in a timely, proportionate and coordinated manner if a provider is not demonstrating capability
• educating providers using the intelligence gathered from notifications
• ensuring notifications are recorded accurately into the business systems to produce meaningful intelligence. 

For more information on the SIRA program go to www.agedcarequality.gov.au/sirs. 

What you'll do: 

Reporting to and with the support of the Team Leader, Serious Incident Response Scheme, you will be responsible for undertaking the initial assessment of reportable incidents to: 

• Strengthen aged care systems to reduce the risk of abuse and neglect. 
• Build providers’ skills so they can better respond to Serious Incidents.
• Enable providers to review incident information to drive improvements in quality and safety. 
• Reduce the likelihood of preventable incidents reoccurring. 
• Ensure people receiving aged care have the support they need. 

An Assessment Officer is required to undertake assessments in accordance with the Commission’s risk framework, operating procedures, and other job aids. Assessment Officers are directly supported in their role by Senior Officers and

Team Leaders who are responsible for more complex assessments.

Position duties

• Assessing sensitive and at times confronting information within prescribed timeframes and guidelines. 
• Searching and analysing the Commission’s business systems.
• Documenting in an accurate and timely manner your assessments and recommendations. 
• Communicating with aged care providers both verbally and in writing, if further information is required to inform an assessment. 
• Commitment to agreed productivity goals. 
• Applying feedback to ensure quality and consistency in the assessment process. 
• Attend, and participate in, team meetings or training when required. 

Further information about this opportunity can be found on our careers page.

Applications close: 31st March 2024, 11:59PM AEST.