Pact’s quality systems manager Ros Murrell has won a national conference scholarship in recognition of her work in the field of quality and health and safety.

Ros has been awarded the NZOQ (New Zealand Organisation for Quality) Conference Scholarship. This allows her to attend the upcoming NZOQ conference in Queenstown.

“'It is such a thrill to win the scholarship ... I didn't expect to win,” Ros says.

Ros’ role at Pact involves working to make community homes and other workspaces a safer environment for people with intellectual disabilities and/or mental health issues and for staff.

In awarding Ros the scholarship, the NZOQ said she was a worthy recipient : “[Ros has] shown exceptional fortitude and foresight in her career and we wish her well.”

Ros is looking forward to meeting other people at the conference who work in the same field.

“The conference will also reinforce the quality aspect of my work; and I will hear lots of new messages about ways of better improving quality for both our clients and staff at Pact,” she says.

Interesting career

Ros has spent 30 years in the health sector working with people who have an intellectual disability. She began her career in the sector at Cherry Farm. By the 1990s Ros was working in community housing, following the policy decision by the Ministry of Health to move care for people with intellectual disabilities from an institutional framework to community housing.

“I set up the first house for people with an intellectual disability for the Pact Trust in 1994. Then one day the manager asked me to carry out staff appraisals. I had no idea what to do!'“

This led to extramural study for five years, as Ros completed her New Zealand Institute of Management Certificate in Supervisory Management. Meanwhile she juggled her study with full-time work, her young family and farming.
Upon completing the NZIM, Ros was promoted to operations manager at Pact.

“The [Pact] trustees asked me to implement the ACC Workplace Safety Practices standards, which aimed to reduce injury in the workplace. There had to be a big mind-shift about injuries for the staff from no process for incidents to incident reporting.”

While staff initially saw the incident report as extra paperwork, with encouragement from Ros they began to see there was a positive outcome because there was a clear reduction in the number of injuries.

“The incident report made staff stop after an incident had occurred and complete the paperwork. By reflecting on the causes of the incident, staff were able to explore how the injury could be prevented in the future and then to put that process into practice.”

Ros was sent to the West Coast as a relieving manager late in 2002. While there she was involved in restructuring the community houses.

Certification standards
Pact then asked Ros to implement the Ministry of Health standards to gain certification. She was given 15 months to complete the work before being audited.

“This required everybody to take on board the new systems and this was a challenge as Pact is responsible for the day-to-day care for 800-plus people with intellectual disabilities and/or mental health issues and 380 staff.”

Path to scholarship

In 2006 two things happened which would lead Ros to apply for the NZOQ Conference Scholarship in 2007. First, Ros enrolled in the NZOQ Certificate in Quality Assurance (CQA). She admits that the CQA has been a huge workload but she has enjoyed the challenge and is now looking forward to implementing some of her new ideas.

Second, Ros had a dream to set up a database of incident reports from throughout Pact and her line manager encouraged her to apply for this project to be implemented. It was given the go-ahead and became her CQA project. The database took the early part of 2007 to develop and is now maintained regularly.

“We now have a fantastic database from which I can manually look for trends. This saves me having to read every incident report. The database also helped in the start of the Safe and Supportive Environment project whereby feedback is now given to staff about incidents that have occurred between client-client and staff-client. This has led to us better managing risk.”

Looking ahead, Ros is excited about attending the NZOQ conference in Queenstown. But for the moment she has put any further study on hold as there are still plenty of ideas from her CQA yet to be implemented. However, after a year of consolidation and also the stimulation from attending the NZOQ conference there is no doubt that Ros will once again set her sights on another career challenge.

Source: NZOQ