Participation in the Five Good Friends Member Advisory Body

As part of the ongoing Aged Care reforms, the Commonwealth Government has introduced a new requirement for all approved providers of Home Care Packages to form a Consumer Advisory Body.

The purpose of the Consumer Advisory Body (we call it a Member Advisory Body), is to gather feedback from the people we have the honour of helping to improve our services.

For Five Good Friends, the Member Advisory Body is a natural extension of the ways in which we already gather regular feedback from our Members and their trusted loved ones. This includes:

Net Promoter Score Survey

Since we launched in 2016, every three months we have sent our Members and their trusted authorised representative a simple survey, which asks them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they are to refer Five Good Friends to other people. This survey is called the Net Promoter Score. It is a simple, tried and statistically valid tool used by many great organisations around the world to continually improve. We send this survey via email to our Members every three months.

Consumer Experience Survey

This survey is a structured set of questions that asks Members and their trusted loved ones to rate the performance of Five Good Friends across areas including the regularity of their services, the quality of our communication and other key areas. We send this via email or through the app to our Member every six months.

Introducing the Member Advisory Body

Our next step is to introduce the Member Advisory Body, where we get to meet face to face once a year with Members who would like to participate. These meetings will enable us to have deeper discussion about our service, your experience of it, where we can improve, what we are doing well, and what new services you would like to see Five Good Friends offer.

Invitations to join will be sent in the new year

We will be sending invitations in the new year to participate in the Member Advisory Body. While we develop and grow this important initiative, we will be limited in the number of Members we can host and the locations where we can hold them. We are going to expand the programme over time to ensure we provide opportunities for more Members to attend. This is why our regular surveys are so important. They give everyone an opportunity to tell us many times across the year about their experience of Five Good Friends. Importantly, we will be sharing the agenda for the Members Advisory Body Meeting and enabling all Members to provide input in this manner.

On behalf of all the team at Five Good Friends, thank you to all our Members and their loved ones for entrusting us with your help and care. We know there are many providers for you to choose from. We will look forward to receiving your on going feedback.