Star Compass has a commitment to providing our people and communities with excellent support workers, who embody dignified, personal, and quality care.

In an industry where Support Work is often over promised and under delivered, a significant number of participants find it difficult to find reliable, diligent and responsive workers. Anecdotal reports often describe workers not showing up to shifts, or being present at the shift but absent in mind and heart. It can be hit or miss to find companies or sole traders that will do, with excellence, what they have said they would.

Early childhood educators are often encouraged to develop their own personal philosophy on their approach to their work. At Star Compass, this is our philosophy for our work.

The first capstone of our distinctive philosophy is that care must be dignified. There must be an underlying understanding of who the participant is, who the support worker is, and what that means for the nature of the work. If there is no strong understanding of the principles that undergird what is occurring in participant care, common issues of neglect and lack of integrity are not a surprise. Knowing the inherent dignity of all humans and how that applies to how other humans should act towards each other points towards a solution to this.

The general approach in care is always to preserve the dignity of the participant, regardless of limitations due to disability. Because all humans are inherently valuable, the care given to help them must be appropriate to that value. For example, when assisting with personal care tasks, this is plainly applied to acting and communicating in a way that upholds the person’s privacy and feelings of independence over their body. In the community when interacting with others, it looks like facilitating conversations where the participant is speaking on their own behalf as much as possible, budgeting for limitations incurred from disability.

Secondly, care must be thoroughly personal. This logically flows from the principal commitment to providing dignified care. People are all created unique in their individual profile of strengths and needs. This means that operating in this industry cannot be with a one-size-fits-all approach, for participant care or for staff development.

Care must be customised to meet the individual needs, support the real areas of impairment in their daily experience, and take an approach that considers the interests of the personality in their environment. In order to do this, staff must be trained to be able to identify individual variables and equipped with the resources to adjust to what is observed.

Thus, staff training also must take an individualised approach, since workers share the same dignity and uniqueness. Support work can be an isolating job, since normatively the support environment is 1:1, thus staff must be paid close attention to in their work to provide wholistic training that develops them to navigate the vocational and broader context in a way that maximises their potential.

Thirdly, care must be quality. Following the recognition of inherent dignity of participants, and the need for a personal and individualised approach to service provision, the implementation of these principles in the support work context must be at the highest level of quality. This is referring to the professionalism and automatic employment of technical skills required in a dynamic support environment. 

As an organisation, we are dedicated to keeping watch on the environment to know the latest advances and innovations in best practice in our industry. This, when combined with our principal values, helps to inform our own standards to provide participants with the highest quality of care. 

With these principles as a foundation, we aim to grow our people, participants and workers alike, in their character and capability. This ultimately builds a culture in our society of championing inherited dignity, mutual recognition of value, and an expectation of excellence in vocation.