Regional cluster group meetings

The Department is keen to support and facilitate regional cluster group meetings moving forward. The Department sees clustering as a way of:

• improving the consistency of interpretation between BCAs
• sharing experience and knowledge between cluster members
• sharing scarce resources such as quality coordinators
• providing collective feedback to the Department's initiatives
• providing input to the development of further national guidance material.

The Department also recommends that BCAs consider sharing the cost of managing their quality assurance systems and processes. For example four or five or more small BCAs could collectively employ one person to manage and coordinate each of their quality assurance systems or, better still, work towards developing a common quality assurance system across all of these organisations. Sharing the cost and leveraging economies of scale, increasing the ease of standardisation and consistency, better sharing of best practice and helping to establish centres of excellence are some of the benefits of this approach.