Ep 48 Yasser's Disability Government Experience wins a new way of delivering innovation for NDIS

Courses relevant to this podcast include:

• ASSIST CLIENTS WITH MEDICATION COURSE ONLINE (AWARENESS TRAINING)
• MANUAL HANDLING TRAINING FOR HEALTHCARE WORKERS
• MANUAL HANDLING TRAINING FOR AGED CARE WORKERS
• PROVIDE FIRST AID IN AN EDUCATION & CARE SETTING (VOC REFRESHER HLTAID004/HLTAID012)

TRANSCRIPT

Unknown Speaker
This is an ihs.com.au production

Brendan Torazzi
Welcome to Episode 48 of the Australian Health and Safety Business Podcast. I'm Brendan Torazzi, the host of the show, and today I'm joined with Yasser Zacky from tender loving care. Good morning.

Unknown Speaker
Good morning to everyone.

Brendan Torazzi
Now you've got a really interesting approach to your it's an NDIS business, is that right? Correct. Tell us about what you're doing differently, I guess, in comparison to other NDIS providers in the market.

Unknown Speaker
So I'm gonna have to give a bit of a background story very quickly. Yeah, please. So So, as a lot of people know, the NDIS is a scheme where it's sort of decided by the government on the parameters of where we can provide services, and a lot of the providers, rightly so doing that different approaches different programs. But essentially, it's similar sort of service delivery. When we had a meeting, I wanted to put a lot of effort into a point of difference, we had to put a lot of thinking process about that. How can we be different in an environment that is pretty much designed by parameters that the government has set for us. So we had to put a lot of effort into so we came up with a couple of initiatives and, and all triggered from people with disability need to contribute back to the community need to contribute back to the economy, and have opportunities equal opportunities that yourself for myself, and employment was one of the ones that ticked a lot of boxes for us. You know, we wanted to get people's disability to work, we know the struggle to find jobs, we know that they struggle to get equal pay. And we know that that affects them with everything else, food, accommodation, that kind of stuff. So employment is important. So we, we did this initiative where we established a brand called Mei foods. And it's an employment pathway. So we get a person with disability that would like to do administration work, for example. So we put them into a Skills Development Program intensive, teach them what the job entails. And once the person is actually ready to take the job. We opened them at open employment at a word right? Now, these initiatives are actually funded by the government. So it's self sustainable business, designed to generate enough revenue to pay rent this will be the exciting part in that is it is targeting 70% of its employees to be people with disability, which is a very high number, but we are at that level at the moment, and it's going really well.

Brendan Torazzi
Wow. So in that business, how many people have you got employed?

Unknown Speaker
As we currently speaking, we have 10 people's disability employed. Yep. And actually two with that disability. We are about to launch in Melbourne, which is waiting for the lockdowns and the pandemic slows down everyone. So that's coming into play. We've been working on that project for two years, Brandon. So it wasn't an easy setup, we had to put a lot of effort and time into it. But we made it happen in the end, which is fantastic.

Brendan Torazzi
And I'm I'm thinking that the government must be loving this innovative approach to it's like a spin on NDIS isn't it? It's like not only are you providing that service, but you're also providing employment pathways.

Unknown Speaker
salutely It's we had a lot of government support in that space. And, and reality speaking is it is unfunded by the government. So there's no pressure on the government as such. It allows people severely to give it back to the economy, pay tax contribute, be able to spend like you and I would spend rather than being a little bit tight on intention.

Brendan Torazzi
And so what what is the background of the NDIS? And like, how long has the scheme been running for and as I understand, it was like, you know, really big providers like I don't know, salvation, Australia, Salvation Army and mission Australia, those kind of providers. That was the history of it was that it wasn't NDIS it was called something else then.

Unknown Speaker
So before the India it was a state based funding, so we square the block funding so the state government will pay organizations only for the nonprofit sector, and to run certain number of hours to complexity things. Then the federal government came with the initiative of the NDIS and all the states jumped on board. And it changes from being a state government block funding base, which is just a lump sum of money goes to organizations and operate within that to individualize funding to people with disability, and then they can choose any provider, they want to work with that initiative with the federal government, they started as trial sites in the Hunter Valley. In 2013, they will take and then the rollout started in 2016. As of this year, the whole country is under the NDIS. Now, so they wrote that the whole country was in phases. So Perth from memory, or Western Australia was the last to join the scheme. But this, I suppose, was the first.

Brendan Torazzi
And so how hard is it for, I guess, for individuals now to choose a provider? Because from what you're describing in the past, they basically there was X amount of providers and the big providers just targeted the individuals now it's, is it flipped around is that?

Unknown Speaker
Yes, sir. So it's a consumer driven market now. And that's and that concept, I believe, from my personal experience, so a lot of confusion in the market, right, because you come from an angle, not for profit secured income, you just had the money regardless, people were there not to turn it around him consumer driven market where the participant, if they're unhappy with you now to pack and walk away, and no, no problems, and you would lose the funding, the difference between the previous model to now is the previous model of the participant, or the client walked away. Yeah, it doesn't affect your funding, currently does. That drove two things competition, and completely healthy competition is always a good thing, because it keeps the value. From a government point of view, they like that. But it also improves the quality because if you don't get creative, if you don't have a point of difference, if you don't put a lot of effort in, in that you get lost in the mix. But it also generated a bit of struggles for people with disability because in the past, they didn't have to overthink. Now they do now they compare quite a lot, that has its positives it has to get in is not always the greatest thing. But the choice and control for the person that is receiving services is the best thing to do. And as opposed to 100% The people need to make choice like you and I you what you want to dress for service you want to get what school, you're gonna go to all the choices that we make within equal rights.

Brendan Torazzi
So I'm thinking that there's a lot of there potentially is a lot of family members that need to get around that person with a disability to help make the decision or is it's like those influences.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, so So the government has what we call a Local Area Coordinator who sometimes we step in and help with depending on how the plan is funded. There's also a position called support coordinators, which they are funded to do the service, they can do a lot of planning with the person and linking services. So those are there to help family members as well. Process of usability are more than capable to do that as equally, there are a few that sit right in the middle, they don't have a lot of family support. They're not. They're not comfortable enough to look for services, and they struggle a little bit. And that's why a lot of organizations including ourselves, we do free advice coming have an obligation for them to sign up on our service. That is because of that gap. There's a huge gap in that space. But information sessions are the just take this initiative. I mean, if we think about it, if if someone was a psychosocial disability, for example, which is that we work in, they like to go to information sessions, very happy, because they don't like mixing with people with that is the disability or a lot life change. They don't like different people to access and enter and give advice about their lives. So you have to have different approaches for those and different types of information. Also found people from refugees community, and they struggled because English really did not speak English very well. And then the NDIS is for people that speak English is quite confusing. So we struggled a lot with that. So we've done some programs for refugees, people with different backgrounds, things like that. But it was something else, but it's getting better by the minute.

Brendan Torazzi
And so how did TLC get involved? Like, how what was your background before? Like, how long is TLC been in operation? And what were you doing before that that led you into the NDIS?

Unknown Speaker
So I personally worked in the sector for more than 12 years. I worked in the government for a period of time I worked in the private sector. I did a lot of senior management Was it based staff were part of it was running out to the NDIS, things like that. So pretty much heavily involved in the before in the race. And after that a lot of education in the disability sector, I don't think I've ever stopped except for this year at the tender loving case started 16. And it was with the change of the from the block funding to the NDIS, which opened up the opportunity for businesses to join in and improve the quality of service delivery, created competition in the past that they did a good job or a bad job is to find out how to step up their

Brendan Torazzi
game. So it sounds like you're really in a unique position, because you've seen it from different you've seen it from the government lens. You've seen it from an educators lens. And now you're seeing it, I guess from running a business lens.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, absolutely. I was. But that was fortunate with a lot of things to be honest. And I must say, the NDIS came as uplifting for me and my career. I suppose in the eyes for a lot of reasons I was heavily involved early on with the NDIS and the change people's love of CFS. But I come I traveled to try a bit of history when we traveled to Australia as a computer engineer, so got a computer background. Then I had a personal experience with my son and ended up studying social work. And you know, went really heavy into the education side, it might be a three four diploma case management in disability I did Master's PhD in Social Work got really heavy into the social work, because I wanted to make a difference from my personal experience.

Brendan Torazzi
It sounds it sounds easy when you say it that fast? Yes. I bet that's a lot of study.

Unknown Speaker
It was it was heavy. And it was a struggle, because I've never like I was alluding to education, but I was never really like I wanted to do a shooting and get out to the world and work because it was something I wanted to continuously do, too. I saw a need and I wanted to make a difference and change people's life. And to do that through education with a personal experience. With knowledge and care factor combining that together, you become a lot more powerful into achieving what you want to achieve. And putting that together with what helped me. But I've always held in the old system, that I was very underutilized. Because I had a level of knowledge, I had a level of experience that allowed me to do a lot more than being in a block funding, not from profit approach, nothing wrong with that. But to add to that business mentality consumer driven market understanding about investment return on investment, how can you improve and maximize service deliver through business mentality. So customer service approach, you know, dealing with complaint, world feedback, driving work culture, in a positive manner to deliver the best for people, this mentality was a huge shift. And I was lucky enough that I have had the background into into a lot of that business aspect and my computer's degree of living used until I moved to tender loving care. Computers yes example. I'm talking about the level of networking, understanding digitalization and going running a project to do artificial intelligence with our processes. So everything becomes very accurate to the dot very, was very minimal human error. So this is where I'm utilizing a lot of my skills in that space to service people with disability at its highest level.

Brendan Torazzi
Do you ever sort of reflect on I know I do this myself where you go, you have this sort of life path and you go if that hadn't happened, then the next step couldn't have happened and you kind of over time you look back and go God I'm so I feel so blessed that all these things, not always good things, but they all sort of develop you know, they

Unknown Speaker
completely look back on my life. And I think I never thought obviously the planner, I plan far ahead of my life always sit down, I do my SWOT analysis, and I build the plan and I stick to the plan. But things come in and change and choose your heart like in the beginning, was very entrepreneurial or wanting to go into the IT world, build the business or work catering towards that. I mean, personal experience came to me and it changed that concept. I started thinking, well all this stuff is great. But if you're not doing social impact, impacting positive your liquidity and have a component in that even through investment And I mean, impact investment is a huge thing at the moment. Because it's good to get run a business. Yes, make profits, yes, have that mentality. But at the same time, give back to the community to good things, help people change people's lives. And I'm sitting in a position that allows me to do that. So I'm very proud of it. And it was because of a press experience that shifted my whole direction to go from scratch just to be able to deliver the best. Yeah, that's

Brendan Torazzi
amazing. So can you give us a feel for, you know, the amount of people that you are impacting with TLC? And what you know, what your staff sizes are the size of the business?

Unknown Speaker
Absolutely. So in total, we have almost 700, staff

Brendan Torazzi
700.

Unknown Speaker
We have close to 500 participants across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Dubai, which was one of the issues that we did part of our differentiation strategy, and how can we contribute back to the Australian economy through highlighting the excellence of the service delivery that Australia has very high standard, and at the same time, generic driven us that can come back to Australia help the economy.

Brendan Torazzi
So that, that staff to client ratio is that fairly typical amongst NDIS providers, or are you is TLC doing something extra to

Unknown Speaker
it is fairly typical. So we driven by what the consumer wants, which is our participants. So they decided they want one to one ratio, more, there was a model in the beginning of the NDIS, where people that have higher ratios. So for example, 123, was financially more viable than then having a one to one support for many different reasons. This is changed because of changes in the way that pricing works with the NDIS. But but it's it really comes from budgets. So every participant is sort of unlimited budget. So once the person gets funding, it is budgeted funding, and we have to work with that. And then we can determine the ratios. If you do lower issues, the plan lasts longer, you can get more out. But sometimes it's risky can't

Brendan Torazzi
do so. So the participants get a an annual budget do that Is that Is that how

Unknown Speaker
it used to be annual now the moving towards two or three year plans are time limited and gets reviewed.

Brendan Torazzi
So I mean, that that's the thing, if you even if you've got, say, a two or three year plan, you you need a provider that is responsible, because otherwise you could burn all that, you know, in a shorter amount of time, and then you're left without any service.

Unknown Speaker
Correct, it happens. I've seen that happening. I've had people, I mean, we have, we have a project that is completely separate from everything we do, which is even evidence support for people that are struggling. So we get someone coming in very struggling family, they need the support. And then the US has a pathway where you can review the plan, right. So if you had a change in circumstances, for example, and you needed more support to utilize the funding a bit more than you really planned for, because in three years or three years, or even one year things change, we can actually apply for review, if you have the evidence to back it up, then they will refund you again and bring you the plan. So it's just a matter of managing that properly. But I've had people walk through the door and utilize our funding, we have changed circumstances. And no one really guided us or helped us to do to step in actually improve our care for them. And we put them through that and they will support you. So until the funding kicks in. There's no back payment, we don't get back paid from the NDIS. So that becomes part of that. And in our budgeting, we allow for that amount of money that we put aside for those kind of things, because they have

Brendan Torazzi
I mean that that creates a lot of goodwill, I would imagine in the community like

Unknown Speaker
you can look, I know that some people are purely doing it as business and I don't particularly have a problem with that. But we try and keep the business component running, we see that to be sustainable, we still have to be at the positive side of things. But I strongly believe that you still have to have a caring component to be to the best and a very strong I've had a positive experience. I know what it feels when you don't get the right. Support even as so we really look at it from that angle. I come from the old school where it wasn't particularly very strong business strong environment, I still hold some of those values in my heart. I'm trying to give back because you're just mixing it. You have to get the right balance. You can't run a purely business in my personal opinion, because then people's care and well being become second and is not really the right thing to do in our space, we work with vulnerable people. So keeping the right balance and putting people in court front of everything we do, let me tell you, we grew and succeeded. And I believe that one of the biggest contributors to that was that we always put people first, the money second, not the other way around.

Brendan Torazzi
Yep. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking, and conversely, you can't run it purely as a charity and not be commercial, because then you don't have a business long term to support those people.

Unknown Speaker
And we have some pressures, there's a lot of changes that happened in the world of India, it's very often to be able to change and adjust. Because very costly, we want to go into state of the art systems that actually supports it, this was really to get better funding to report better to India is to be compliant to secure the funding immigrants utilize the right way, is amazing. Now, we sometimes get an end user or participant that particularly see the value in that we have to keep that balance. So it's maintaining high quality one business running on the back end, and then how to keeping a tight Corporate Services, and at the same time not affecting the service delivery. And what I've done with that is a completely separated two. So the K team don't work with, are we losing money making money out? No, they work purely about what the person needs, and how can we meet that need, within that we have, and the that's the heavy language they use. And that's everything we stand for, in these corporate suicide, which is a finance operation and all that. Make sure that we are sustainable while we're delivering the goods.

Brendan Torazzi
What's the split, say with, you know, those that operation side, percentage wise, versus the carrier side?

Unknown Speaker
overhead costs in general? At the moment, with the vision that we have, it's really quite hard because we are under a bit of pressure as an organization, because we're trying to deliver the best feeling to quality quite a lot. Yeah, we rotate a lot of our revenue back to the organization to deliver that

Brendan Torazzi
we're growing, right is that is that mean that you've

Unknown Speaker
got to do the growth in a smart way. So I've seen organizations that would grow, grow, grow, grow, and then start collapsing, the just the quality gets affected. So for us, we had to do steady growth and very smart, well educated people. You know, we monitor and watch and keep a close eye on everything we do. So nothing is random. Nothing's out of nowhere. Everything's planned. And we'll always have a contingency plan. COVID-19 No one expected it. But we had a contingency plan for diseases, particularly COVID. But we had a plan in place, that if if a disease comes in a natural disaster comes in, what would TLC do? Our children that plan. And in the in the pandemic, we grew, because we had very strict plan was already in place prior to the COVID that we triggered. So that set us ahead. So a lot of planning a lot of educated planning is very important. And my team, are we ready? Are we very picky?

Brendan Torazzi
So I was interested in like with a lot of these government schemes. You mentioned compliance and reporting become increasingly important from the government point of view. What sort of team size do you need for that aspect of the business?

Unknown Speaker
For us? Yes, as Kinder loving K hour, we call it quality and safety department, which essentially, compliance is just more positive language. We have four people doing purity quality. And that's that's quite a high number. We'll go over heavy on compliance. And then all the managers that the senior managers, the executive committee, that compliance is the fifth topic every time we meet so risk management compliance. Always have an incident reports and complaints, those four topics, or every meetings, topics. Talk for the general business. Yeah.

Brendan Torazzi
I was gonna ask you, you mentioned Jubei earlier. Tell us about that. Because I wouldn't have thought that there's any or there wouldn't be met. Surely there can't be too many Australian providers sort of starting to export this service. What What was that all about?

Unknown Speaker
So there is no

Brendan Torazzi
okay, there you go.

Unknown Speaker
So we are the only strength provider index cases other struggle for businesses. And from from my research, I think we're the only international Australia provider In our space as well, I haven't looked very heavily to try and see what's true and connect and collaborate. But I couldn't find anyone. It is a very unique space to go interact, because the risks are very high, unpredictable. And we worked very hard on that project, to be honest. But it was, I got to ask that question, by the way, all the time. Why do I am not going to? Does it make us different? Because a lot of providers are in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and yet none of them are in Dubai. Meeting to country's standards. All it does is it improves your quality, because you're not only meeting the transcendent, you're actually meeting a whole lot of different quality framework. A very powerful tool, by the way, they're very strict, they're within some struggles with the language, for example. They don't call people with disability as people with disability, the language they use is people with determination, which are kind of like the typical Yeah,

Brendan Torazzi
that's a nice, that's a nice way of phrasing it. Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker
So we had to do adjustments to some of our policies, procedures, language, the training, because all the training comes from Australia. So, you know, putting that in place was a bit of a struggle just to learn the language in the way we do things. But it sets us apart, we completely ahead in our game, because of our exposure. You know, and that made me think you

Brendan Torazzi
That's awesome. Well, yeah. So congratulations on your success. That's amazing to grow, you know, an organization to that size and be making such as social impact. If people want to find out more about tender loving care, what's your website?

Unknown Speaker
Let's kill the loving kid condo. That was the plan. Make it easy? And they can call us as well. If you have it for me to share the number. Yeah. 100%. It's one 300 double NINE Triple H bar.

Brendan Torazzi
Okay, that's fantastic. Well, thank you very much for coming on the

Unknown Speaker
show today. Yes, sir. Pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Unknown Speaker
You've been listening to an ohs.com.au production.

Brendan Torazzi
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