Editorial: A practical SQUARE Guide on quality service for boards of disability service providers for adults with intellectual disability in Australia

Both consumers and management have important roles to play in aspects of service delivery, though it is the board as the most senior body within a disability service provider organisation that has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that practical, ethical, financial and regulatory viability including quality service is achieved [Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), 2016]. In the present paper, it is postulated that several fundamental factors are related to a disability service provider board’s mismatch of board priorities with those of quality service delivery, amongst them few are: insufficient openings for the consumer voice of lived experience of intellectual disability on quality service at every level of board activity; board leadership insufficiently well organised with respect to structure, function, diversity, skill and industry knowledge, so it cannot carry out its duties on quality service; boards lacking a comprehensive vision of the importance and scope of quality service coupled with insufficiently allocated resources to attend to quality service; and boards having a deficiency of systems to obtain quality service data, assess and direct action on deficiencies and act to continuously improve service. Given the absence of literature specifically for boards of disability service providers on quality service, the guide recommendations derive from resourced, referenced and collated information from generic board documents (e.g. Australian Institute of Company Directors), published literature across a spectrum of papers on quality service in intellectual disability (Buntinx and Schalock, 2010) and consumer input significance (National People with Disabilities and Carer Council, 2009) must be considered as “a first draft”, for later testing for evidence base validation. Donabedian’s model broadly organises its consideration of human service by inputs, process and outcomes. [...]the remaining steps become action focussed on: inputs: collections of quality service data; process: measurements, comparisons, weighing up and analysis; and outputs: decisions, deliverables and directions on quality service.