Imagine: a freelance carer or agency worker arrives at a location for the first time. She’s experienced, knows the drill, and is motivated. But which protocol does she use? The medication policy she saw last week at location A, still saved on her phone? Or the updated version, sitting somewhere in a shared folder she hasn’t yet found? Sadly, this situation occurs all too often in elderly and disability care. In this blog, we take a closer look and share three practical, accessible tips to help you ensure work instructions stay consistent.
With rotating teams, agency workers and freelancers in elderly and disability care, transferring information becomes a discipline in itself. Permanent staff pass on knowledge through colleagues, informal conversations and their own interpretation of what “the agreed approach” is. New faces miss that context and have no time to build it up. A freelancer working two days a week has even less opportunity to learn the local ways of working.
At the same time, many organisations in elderly and disability care operate across multiple locations. And each location tends to develop its own practices. Not because people ignore guidelines, but because protocols live in the heads of those who have been there for years. As soon as those people change, so does the interpretation.
The result: two locations within the same organisation work differently. An agency worker adapts to the location, not to the policy. And the quality manager knows it, but has no straightforward way to correct it.
The consequences are rarely dramatic. Things don’t go wrong immediately, but the risks do accumulate.
Staff work with outdated versions of protocols they once printed or saved. Think of a hygiene protocol updated after an inspection, where the old version is still circulating on the ward. Or a protocol on boundary-crossing behaviour that exists on paper, but which new staff never actively encounter. Even though situations involving inappropriate behaviour are not uncommon in elderly care, and recognition is essential.
In disability care, the same applies to medication policies. Guidelines are tightened, but the question is whether all permanent staff, agency workers and freelancers receive the same information at the same time.
When an incident or inspection occurs, it becomes clear that two teams handled the same situation differently. Not because they worked poorly, but because they had different information. For quality managers, this means constantly putting out fires. Checking, correcting, explaining. For every new staff member, at every location, again and again.
There’s no magic solution to the complexity of rotating teams. We wish there were. But here’s the good news: there are choices that make it structurally easier to keep work instructions consistent across multiple locations. Get your pen or keyboard ready:
Choose to have a single, current version of each work instruction available in one place. Not on the intranet, and in a folder, and in an old email. Whether it’s a long-standing member of staff or a new agency worker walking through the door, everyone needs to be confident that the protocol they’ve found is correct. That sounds obvious, but ask yourself how many versions of your most-used protocol are currently in circulation.
A protocol that’s hard to find won’t be found. It’s that simple. Especially not by a freelancer or agency worker who is short on time and doesn’t yet know their way around. It pays off to think carefully about how information is organised. Are protocols arranged logically? Can they be searched by keyword? Can someone find them without having to ask a colleague?
Agreements become outdated when no one is responsible for maintaining them. Every document should have an owner, and that owner should be actively reminded of a review date. Not retrospectively, when someone happens to notice a protocol no longer reflects reality. When documents are systematically maintained and reviewed, you prevent outdated agreements and the confusion that follows.
Dichterbij, a disability care organisation, recognised this situation too. Documents were scattered across multiple systems, weren’t always up to date, and multiple versions were circulating side by side. Project leader Henri Pijnappels describes the desired situation clearly:
Colleagues need to be able to assume that information can be found quickly and that it is current, regardless of which system it comes from. You don’t want three different versions of a document floating around.”
The goal isn’t perfect uniformity. That’s neither realistic nor necessary. But when the right information is always findable for whoever needs it, and is properly maintained, your permanent staff, agency workers and freelancers can work with greater confidence, also across locations.
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