Our proudest achievements of 2025
How Apollo Care is helping make Yackandandah Health Aged Care an even better place to live and work
This year, Yackandandah Health Aged Care has continued to deliver excellent care to residents, maintaining, increasing its overall rating on My Aged Care this year from 3 to 4 stars.
November also saw the implementation of the New Aged Care Act, one of the most significant reforms the sector has seen. For providers, this marks a new era of rights, risk, and responsibility, demanding stronger governance, transparency and consumer focus than ever before.
Apollo Care’s specialist support ensured Yackandandah Health Aged Care was prepared to meet the 22 key provider responsibilities and strengthened aged care standards.
Clinical care
- Yackandandah Aged Care’s care minutes increased and now exceed the required targets
- We implemented the BestMed medication software that:
- Streamlines the prescribing and supply of medications for doctors, pharmacists and care staff
- Improves the accuracy of medicine administration
- Tracks data to drive safety and quality improvement
- Our teams use Australia’s most advanced handheld care technology to give them more time with residents, and less time on paperwork
- We aligned our policies and practices to the new Aged Care Act
Resident wellbeing
- Yackandandah Aged Care’s Residents’ Experience Survey on My Aged Care was maintained at 4 stars
- We extended our Resident Wellbeing Program to ensure daily lifestyle experiences are equally important as clinical care.
- Apollo Care’s investment in a National Lifestyle Coordinator is benefitting residents and staff. This Coordinator:
- Provides ongoing support, development and inspiration to our Lifestyle Team to continue to strengthen Yackandandah Aged Care’s lifestyle program
- Facilitated Apollo Care’s inaugural Lifestyle Development Conference, attended by our Lifestyle Team
- Facilitates a regular Lifestyle Governance Forum where all Apollo Care lifestyle leads collaborate, review and plan together
- We’ve implemented initiatives to improve our food service and dining experience and ensure they align with the new Act
- Extending the rollout of Simple Food technology to improve resident ordering process, menu planning, allergy management, and equipment maintenance and compliance
- Introduced a 24-hour snack station so residents can access refreshments outside of regular mealtimes
- Improving nutrition with 6-monthly on-site menu reviews by a Dietician
- Conducting regular Food Focus meetings with residents and families
- Commenced a food audit process
Our team
- We’ve grown our permanent workforce by 15.38%, reducing our reliance on agency staff
- We secured a rental house to provide affordable accommodation to new staff
- 61% of staff participated in our staff engagement program that boosts wellbeing, drives a positive and engaged mindset, and focusses staff on what’s best for everyone at Yackandandah Aged Care
- Staff celebrated 87 inspiring examples of excellent care through this program
Our community
- Following a generous community bequest, we are in the planning stages of upgrading the existing
- Memory Support Household to be in line with modern dementia support design practices, including senses of home and interactive garden spaces
- We made Yackandandah Aged Care safer by implementing Rapid Global sign-in software for visitors and contractors
- We continued to develop Australia’s first AI-powered aged care analytics portal, Operations Insight Suite (OIS) that the Yackandandah Health team is using to enhance their business performance and care delivery
- Yackandandah Health has stayed proudly local, guided by a Board that reflects the unique needs of our area
Medical Centre
- We have been preparing for accreditation that is due next year
- We have remediated the ICT network, replaced servers and upgraded to cloud-based software
Little Yacks Early Learning
- We engaged a specialist consultant to support the Little Yacks Director and lead quality improvements. This consultant has completed a gap assessment and identified opportunities to improve the quality of early learning in line with best practice.
- We had a successful monitoring visit from the Victorian Deptartment of Education
- Our $250K investment in a new playground is being enjoyed by the children