Rebuilding community care after two failed systems
When Leah Konings joined Warramunda Village as Quality Coordinator, she inherited a crisis, not a quality role. Community care was under a directions notice, residential care had a notice to act, COVID was tearing through the region, and the organisation was almost entirely paper-based — “eight thousand pieces of paper in a filing cabinet, and you're not sure which one's which.” Leah unexpectedly moved into the Director of Community Care role when the previous executive left, and spent the next four years rebuilding: clearing the directions notice and the NTA on the first re-audit, growing from around 60 to nearly 200 home care package clients, and adding NDIS and private clients along the way. Two full system implementations came and went before Lookout — one built for residential care that didn't fit community care's workflows at all, and a second that looked right in the demo but, over more than twelve months of trying to make it work, kept coming back with ‘that's not included’ or ‘that hasn't been developed yet.’
— Leah Konings, Director of Community Care, Warramunda Village
A platform built for community care
Warramunda needed one thing above all: a platform that treated community care as its own discipline, not an add-on to residential software — with rostering and case management genuinely integrated, not bolted together. Lookout Way's implementation ran in two stages, first under the old home care package rules and then again when Support at Home reforms landed mid-rollout. Leah is candid that it wasn't seamless —there's no backup plan for a first roster go-live — but every issue the team hit, they worked through, with weekly catch-ups from their implementation team and role-based, hands-on training run on-site rather than over a screen-share. Go-live day, by Leah's account, went off without a single incident.
— Leah Konings, Director of Community Care, Warramunda Village
From regulatory notice to national awards finalist
The clearest proof of Warramunda's turnaround arrived this year, when the organisation was named a finalist in two categories at the Ageing Australia National Awards — out of more than 500 nominations — and won the Project category outright for its residential building expansion. The community care team's finalist placing recognised its transition to Support at Home, including the Lookout Way rollout, while continuing to grow client numbers through one of the hardest twelve-month stretches the sector has seen. Day to day, the shift shows up in smaller ways too: case managers work from a single dashboard instead of chasing information across systems and a shared drive; ticket templates the team built themselves have cut duplicated work; and rostering, once run on a completely separate system from client management, now flows straight from a ticket to a roster everyone can see. Families can check a live roster instead of waiting on a mailed copy that was out of date the moment it printed.
— Leah Konings, Warramunda Village
Looking ahead
Warramunda recently added Lookout Assist and a new incident management system, and the early response from case managers — visibly excited enough that Leah heard them from her office fifty metres away — suggests AI-assisted care plans will be the next big efficiency gain. The organisation has also just become a Category 5 provider under the new Support at Home rules, bringing clinical services in-house that were previously outsourced to an overstretched district nursing system, withLookout's new clinical forms built specifically to support that shift.
