Regional Housing Limited (RHL) is a not-for-profit company managing emergency, transitional, and long-term social housing for people in need throughout Central Queensland, Australia. They also offer complementary support programs such as financial counselling and emergency relief.
- Vision: Every person has a home
- 43 staff and offices in 5 locations
- Portfolio of > 400 properties accommodating > 700 people
- Turnover ~$7 million (2019)
- Using LOGIQC since 2013
CEO Brett Hanna joined RHL in 2004, after 20 years managing frontline homeless services, and has helped grow and shape the organisation into a leader in community housing in regional Queensland. Compliance is a key driver for quality management.
It was the first level of regulation for our industry, and it requires a high standard of record keeping and a requirement for evidence-based processes. This could be as simple as evidence that a complaint has led to a change in one of our policies or procedures. Or something much more serious and risky, such as statutory fire maintenance on our properties.
As an organisation, we try to remain on the front foot, not be reactive. While the regulatory environment was getting tighter, we also wanted to regularly review our internal policies and procedures. We had some good internal systems and processes but we were growing and we needed something in the background to do the thinking and planning—a system that reminded everyone and allowed us to allocate tasks so that we could track compliance.
Why choose LOGIQC?
When you go shopping for systems you don’t know what you don’t know. But I didn’t see another system that had all the functionality that LOGIQC has. Some systems might manage HR, licensing and record-keeping but wouldn’t do audits, or document management or complaint management or incident management. I also wanted best bang for buck—as a charity, our budget was small and justifying the expense is challenging.
Implementing LOGIQC
Of all the systems I’ve ever seen, Logiqc QMS is the only one you can put a new employee in front of and, within an hour, they can teach themselves how to use it. It’s designed to be simple.
Benefits of LOGIQC
We went live with Logiqc QMS in 2013.
Since then, we’ve had two other layers of regulation—the Human Services Quality Standards (HSQS) and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Now, without realising it, all our staff are involved in quality and we remain in a state of compliance. Audits and compliance reviews are no longer a rush with everyone scrambling to get the evidence together the day before—the system is current at all times. Honestly, being continuously compliant is the single biggest benefit in a heavily regulated world. It helps me, and the board, sleep better at night.
If something critical needs to be done, such as statutory fire maintenance on our properties, the system reminds us. We have Bluecard licensing for all staff and at any time we can know if someone’s card is expired. We’re always checking our compliance and we have internal audits built into the system. We have a quality officer, but all staff are involved in audits. An improvement will be registered in Logiqc QMS and linked to the audit; it’s then assigned to someone and the system nags them until its done. [The whole thing is connected], end to end.
We have a couple of hundred policies at least and we have pre-set cycles of when they’re due for review. So we know they’re always current and reviewed every couple of years.
We use Logiqc QMS extensively for feedback and incidents. Feedback could be a compliment from a funding body or a private landlord; it could be a complaint or a dispute. We categorise them and have processes [for managing them]. An incident might be a WH&S incident or a negative social media comment. Every 3 months, we look at all feedback and look for trends—maybe we need to change a policy. Logiqc QMS is our primary source for recording complaints and for recording the team meeting to review that complaint. Logiqc QMS allows us to follow a complaint all the way through to the changed policy.
And with version control, we have the confidence that we are always using the current version of a document.
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