What are the Healthchecks?
One of the most valuable assets of a community service organisation is its reputation. Adhering to good governance principles and practices will ensure that your organisation will be known as a good and worthwhile community services agency.
The Governance Healthchecks can help you assess the health and standards of your organisation’s governance across three key areas:
- General board (good) governance
- Financial governance
- Quality governance.
These online self-assessment tools will help you determine areas of your organisation where governance is strong and areas where improvements need to be made.
The Healthchecks provide a general indication of the health of your organisation’s governance. They are not an exhaustive list of all aspects of good governance nor are they an exhaustive audit.
We recommended you run the Healthcheck annually to assess and monitor your progress.
Who should use the Healthchecks?
The General Board (Good) Governance and Financial Governance Healthchecks have been particularly designed for small and medium sized community service organisations, although larger organisations may also benefit from using the tool.
The Quality Governance Healthcheck is specifically designed for use by board members across all community services delivered, funded and regulated by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing including, but not limited to:
- Child protection
- Child and family services
- Disability services
- Housing and homelessness services
- Family violence services
- Community based health services.
For other organisations, many of the principles of quality governance will still be relevant and useful – such as risk management, culture and leadership and client engagement.
How do the Healthchecks work?
We have tried to make using the Healthchecks as easy as possible.
Using the Healthcheck is as simple as signing up, starting a multiple choice questionnaire, and then viewing your results. You can complete three different Healthchecks.
Using the ‘Invites’ feature is straight forward too.
- Simply sign up then invite the participants’ emails of your board you wish to complete the Healthcheck. A minimum of two invitations must be sent.
- Invitees will receive an email with a unique link to complete the questions.
- When all your invitees have completed the Healthcheck you will receive an amalgamated result to get a clearer picture of where improvement may be needed.
- It’s important to remember that if you invited people, the result will go to you only. We encourage you to share the results with those people who you invited to complete the Healthcheck.
- You can also first complete a single personal Healthcheck, then convert it into a multi-user Healthcheck by inviting people to it.
We’re committed to continuous improvement and delivering a Healthcheck tool that is useful and effective for community service organisations.
If you have any feedback, please send us an email.
What’s new?
The VCOSS Healthchecks have been revised in 2020, with a number of updates made to provide you with a better user experience:
- The new Quality Governance Healthcheck has been implemented, in partnership with the Victorian Department of Families, Fairness and Housing.
- Improved interface and graphics.
- We’ve fixed some technical gremlins. If you find any, please let us know.
- PDF result reports have a new layout for improved readability.
- The maximum number of people who can complete a multi-user Healthcheck has increased from 10 to 20 to allow for more participants.
Made possible by…
The General Board (Good) Governance and Financial Governance Healthchecks are an initiative of the Victorian Council of Social Service, made possible with support from the Helen Smith Macpherson Trust.
The Quality Governance Healthcheck has been developed in partnership between the Victorian Council of Social Service and the Community Services Quality and Safety Office, Department of Families, Fairness and Housing.