Building Partnerships in Aged Care

This case study describes how Warrigal, a community-owned aged care service provider in the Illawarra and  Southern Highlands of NSW and central and southern Canberra, developed strong partnerships with value aligned RTOs to both develop its own workforce, as well as address aged care and disability workforce challenges across their region.

Key insights include:

• Investing time to build a relationship and shared understanding can lead to improved long term benefits.
• Providing training on site of the employer organisation makes it more relevant for the staff and develops the RTOs understanding of specific employer training needs.
• The partnership provides reciprocal benefits for the RTOs and employer in relation to student placements, tailored employer training needs, sharing of information about industry, funding and regulations, and publicity.
• The partnership creates benefits to the wider sector in developing training specific to industry needs and modeling an approach to address ongoing challenges in the aged care, disability and VET sectors.