Page 57 - Statement of Intent 2015/16

4.3.3 Safe and Competent Workforce
Waikato DHB continues to have a strong focus on safety and competence for our workforce. Waikato DHB continues to support the regional approach, utilising the Regional Director of Training, to address workforce requirements.
4.3.4 Child Protection Policies
The Vulnerable Children Act 2014 sets priorities for improving the wellbeing of vulnerable children and ensuring children’s agencies work together to improve the wellbeing of vulnerable children. Key is the requirement of agencies working with children to adopt, report on and require child protection policies.
Waikato DHB has adopted a robust child protection policy, ensured every contract and funding arrangement requires all services working in whole or part delivering services to children adopt a child protection policy, will review the policy three yearly and report through the DHB Annual Report.
4.3.5 Children’s Worker Safety Checking
Waikato DHB will meet the safety checking requirements of the Vulnerable Children’s’ legislation within prescribed legislative and / or regulatory timeframes (1 July 2015).
Waikato DHB already police vets staff. This process is well established. There is also a process to identify all staff within the provider division who are within the ‘core children’s workforce’ under the Vulnerable Children’s Act. These staff will then undergo additional safety vetting and screening processes as they are recruited, and in time retrospectively for those staff members already employed.
Because of its centralised and standardised recruitment process Waikato DHB is able to institute a series of worker safety interview questions once these have been identified nationally. These questions would be asked during interviews and during reference checking.
4.4 Organisational Health
We need to make sure that we have the people, relationships, and processes that will enable us to achieve our outcomes, impacts, and outputs. We cannot be successful without well-qualified and motivated staff, sound management of resources and an effective working relationship between staff and stakeholders.
4.4.1 Governance
We have an established governance structure based on the requirements of the NZPHD Act 2000, through which the DHB functions. Governance plays a key role in determining what we need to do to maximise the impact on our outcomes.
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