Audit of Residential Facilities, Final report - Division for Social Policy ...

In one province, management indicated that they ensured the well-being of their staffby insisting that they take their leave and through staff outings and team buildingactivities.vii.viii.Outsourced staff – A number of homes are now using outsourced staff to fill keyfunctions within the homes, most notably, staff nurses, nursing assistants anddomestic staff. The issue with using outsourced staff is that the agencies do notprovide these staff with any benefits. Many argue that the rights of these workers arecompromised through these agencies and the homes do not need to take anyresponsibilities for the appointment, payment, and management of the staff. If they arenot happy with a staff member the agency would simply replace them.Use of Volunteers – In the more rural areas there was more community involvementand fund-raising efforts, particularly from the Afrikaans churches and the localfarmers. In the urban areas it seems that community interaction was aroundfundraising whereas in smaller towns community interaction was more obvious andthe community volunteered more of their time in helping with nail care, taking oldpeople shopping, and so forth. It was particularly noted that volunteerism in thesecommunities should not be under-played particularly as white Afrikaans churches andfarming communities provide lots of support to homes as part of their voluntary orcharitable work.ix.Staff Performance Assessments and Staff in-service training – Monitoring staffperformance is a key component of any well functioning organisation. Againmanagement indicated in more instances that staff performance assessments weredone while staff on the other hand, indicated in much less homes that these tookplace. In Mpumalanga and Northern Cape the differences between management andstaff on the issue of performance assessments was in as many as 30% of the home.Only in Limpopo did staff and management agree on this issue, although this could beindicative of the fact that there are only 7 homes in this province, although thedifferences between the views of management and staff in relation to staff in-servicetraining in Limpopo is particularly high as can be seen from the graph below.The Guidelines makes reference to regular supervision sessions between management and staffincluding accurate staff records, and annual staff assessments50 | D S D A u d i t o f R e s i d e n t i a l F a c i l i t i e s