In aged care, boards are navigating increasing regulatory scrutiny, workforce pressures, financial constraints and rising community expectations. Yet one of their most important responsibilities can still be misunderstood: the governance of the quality of care delivered by their organisation.

Clinical governance is sometimes treated as the domain of clinicians, quality teams or management, with boards receiving dashboards, incident reports and compliance data as evidence of oversight. Effective governance requires more. While every member of the workforce has a role in delivering and supporting high-quality care, responsibility for establishing, overseeing and continuously improving the systems through which care is governed rests with governing bodies and executive leaders.

This presentation will explore what this responsibility means in practice for aged care directors and senior leaders, and how boards can move beyond compliance-based oversight towards governance that actively enables high-quality care, organisational learning and improvement.

The presentation will examine five practical areas of board oversight:

1. Clarifying responsibility and accountability – distinguishing the board’s governance responsibilities from the operational responsibilities of executives, managers and clinicians, while maintaining a productive board and CEO relationship.
2. Knowing whether care is good – examining the information boards need to understand quality beyond headline indicators, including resident experience, outcomes, incidents, complaints, workforce signals, audit findings and patterns of variation.
3. Moving from data to assurance – distinguishing reporting from genuine assurance and considering the questions directors should ask to determine whether systems are working as intended, including when nobody is watching.
4. Governing for learning and improvement – exploring how boards influence whether organisations respond to incidents and poor outcomes through blame and remediation, or through system learning, improvement and sustained change.
5. Connecting clinical and corporate governance – demonstrating why quality of care, workforce, culture, strategy, risk and financial sustainability cannot be governed as separate issues.

Using practical aged care examples and contemporary clinical governance thinking, delegates will be invited to consider the questions boards should be asking, the evidence they should expect, and the behaviours that create stronger accountability without crossing the boundary into operational management.

Delegates will leave with a practical framework for examining their own board’s oversight of clinical governance and three questions to take back to the boardroom: How do we know care is good? How do we know our systems are working? And how do we know we are getting better?