Fronditha Care President says good governance ‘essential’ to financial recovery

Jill Taylor (Nikitakis), Fronditha Care President and Board Chair, addressed over 50 members who attended an information session on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at Fronditha Care Mulgrave Hub.

She noted that the past few months, (since the appointment of new Directors in late November 2020), had been a time of a transition for Fronditha Care: “The new Board set about consolidating changes to governance arrangements in December and appointed new CEO, Faye Spiteri in February 2021, to address the serious financial challenges faced.”

She added: “The new Directors have the requisite financial expertise in service delivery, governance and connection to community to swiftly move the organisation in the direction it needed to go. We introduced new measures to ensure strong financial governance and rapidly set about working with the CEO in implementing organisational change to deliver financial sustainability.”

Jill Taylor (Nikitakis) advised the meeting: “We want to work in the long-term interest of the organisation and you -its members, and further we want as a Board and Executive to be transparent. We faced significant financial issues in 2020 which were accumulating at an unsustainable rate. So, to redress this we immediately focused on building financial capability alongside management and operational capability.”

Taylor (Nikitakis) gave an in-depth report to the members about the critical financial issues the organisation had been facing and its grim future, with an inability of the then management to undertake a strategic review of organisational operations and costs to recalibrate.

She advised of the steps taken to address these and the positive results already seen in a relatively short period, expressing optimism about the organisation’s future fortunes. She added: “We moved forward with fundamental and rapid changes, established stronger fiduciary oversight at the Board and Executive level without compromising the quality of care and service delivery, mitigated the liquidity risks, and just today finalised contracts and secured a loan for our major capital works.”

The President noted that the new St Albans facility is expected to open in the next few months, and cater for 90 residents in total while improvements to other facilities are scheduled to start in the upcoming months.

The CEO and Executive enacted its strategy “Framing the Way Forward – A 90 Day Transformation Plan” with the first stage being a restructure at Corporate level focused on a function review and efficiencies and review of Master Rosters in Residential Services.

The President emphasised that quality of care has not been compromised and no care staff lost their jobs, either in Community or Residential Services. At the same time, the assessment of the Master Roster in the five residential facilities has produced millions of dollars of savings.

“We haven’t compromised the quality of care, we just learned to work differently, more efficiently to deliver the same results to the people we care for,” she added.

With an eye to the future, the organisation has established short and long-term strategic goals that will see Fronditha Care flourish and evolve its model of care and service delivery over a 20-year action plan, 10-year strategy and rolling implementation plans.

She concluded: “The result of our actions is already tangible, and we conservatively anticipate that Fronditha Care will be back in a profitable position by December 2022. Fronditha Care is an agile and robust organisation. We are confident that we will keep delivering services to the community for many more decades, and the team and I are optimistic and excited about the organisation’s future.”

Attendees asked questions and made comments and congratulated the Board, CEO and Executive team for their hard work and the significant positive turnaround and results they managed to deliver in such a short period, noting they looked forward to future information sessions on organisational progress.