Document Management complying with NQF Element 7.3.1

by | 020617 | Uncategorized

Element 7.3.1 of the NQF requires that “Records and information are stored appropriately to ensure confidentiality, are available from the service and are maintained in accordance with legislative requirements”.

There are a wide range of records and information that need to be created and stored within an ECEC centre. These include records specific to children, including medical information and incident reports, centre policies and procedures and the centres strategies and Quality Improvement Plan.

Centre management develop these documents over a period of time, so there will be multiple versions that need to be managed. Over many years these documents need to be created and updated by multiple staff, retained in a central accessible location and easily located.

There are multiple issues that a document management solution within an ECEC centre needs to address:

  1. How do staff know they are using the latest or correct version of a document?
  2. How do you demonstrate a history of development of documents within a NQF audit?
  3. How do you maintain the security appropriate for the information contained in the document, for example sensitive child and staff information?
  4. How do you ensure the information is stored for the correct length of time as stipulated by legislation, for example until the child turns 21 in the case of Incident Reports?

There are three elements that need to be addressed in implementing and managing a document management solution within your ECEC centre. These are:

  1. Ensuring you implement an intuitive easy to use solution that facilitates the creation, retention and searching for the range of documents required within your ECEC centre. We recommend the use of SharePoint within Office 365 as the basis of a document management solution as this delivers a robust cloud based document management solution with guaranteed levels of availability, built in management tools such as version control, strong search capability and managed redundancy including data backup.
  2. A logical structure for storing the documents and a process for ensuring documents are created and stored appropriately. Cloudbridge have developed a Document Management Framework within Microsoft Office365 specifically for the ECEC sector based on the NQF and legislative requirements. Using this framework staff will know where to store and locate documents and will know they are using the latest version of this document.
  3. Staff trained in using the solution including how to correctly store and search for documents. This requires an initial hands on training session for staff and ongoing familiarisation with the document management solution based on frequent usage.

If you are interested in implementing Microsoft Office 365 and/or our Document Management Framework within your ECEC centre/s please contact us at enquiry@cloudbridge.com.au or on 0409 268 648. Further details on our Childcare Document Storage Framework can be found at https://www.cloudbridge.com.au/document-management/.