The awarding body in cleanliness standards

The Continuous Advancement Programme (CAP) represents a commitment to excellent standards of hygiene in housekeeping and food service in catering. The annual progressive development scheme offers tailor-made goals and support to help you achieve recognised standards. Designed for the education and healthcare sectors, the programme streamlines processes within your organisation.

The Cap Awards
Healthcare

Healthcare

We lead the way to a positive future for healthcare to benefit patients, residents and staff. We work with you to ensure your housekeeping and catering reflects the same high standards as the excellent medical care you provide. In addition to improving qualitative standards, we also strive to improve efficiencies. Our expert guidance supports your housekeeping and catering functions to operate consistently and smoothly.

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Gold

Education

Take advantage of CAP membership to grow your school's reputation and stand above others within a fiercely competitive landscape. Support for housekeeping and catering departments shapes the quality of experience for pupils, staff and visitors alike.

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Raising standards nationally

The Cap Awards programme aims to transform your organisation with measurable impact by:

  • Recognising the teams and individuals consistently performing exceptional work behind the scenes.
  • Motivating housekeeping and catering teams by recognising their achievements and providing guidance and tips to empower them to reach the next level towards excellence.
  • Demonstrating that you follow excellent hygiene standards to prevent the spread of viruses.

Join many other hospitals, care homes and schools that have enriched their team and users by investing in the programme.

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What are the CAP Awards?

The CAP Awards are an integral part of the CAP Award Programme (Continuous Advancement Programme). It is an international tier programme which promotes and awards excellence. The four award levels are Bronze, Silver and Platinum. The programme guides and develops housekeeping and catering teams to continuously improve their service to provide consistent, impeccable high standards of hygiene and catering. Furthermore, it increases team morale and motivation resulting from an increased sense of purpose and the recognition received for their hard work and achievements. It brings teams closer than ever before.

Don’t just take our word for it, why not take a look at our ‘News’ section to see what our clients say about the CAP Award Programme?

What to expect from CAP?

With clear targets and objectives set annually to meet legal and regularity guidelines it becomes easy to measure and recognise the development of your team and business.

Never has there been a greater opportunity to elevate your quality of service while reducing costs.

How does the CAP Award programme work?

First, the CAP Award (Continuous Advancement Programme) involves a fresh audit of the housekeeping or catering service to its strengths and weaknesses. The findings of this will determine whether the service will continue to be recognised for its commitment to achieving an award for its high standards, or if it attains recognition for reaching the Bronze, Silver or Gold CAP Award standard.No matter which standard is attained, the report from the audit will help us to agree clear targets that will immediately unlock the team’s potential to work closely together to maintain and improve the service.

What are the CAP Award tiers and how can we reach them?

There are four tiers Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

  • Bronze

Awarded in recognition of the service delivery operating above the bar line of basic “Best Practice.”

  • Silver

The Silver Award as assessed during the announced visit is awarded for service delivery that exceeds the ‘Best practice’ and regulatory criteria. It rewards the department for excellence and ‘going that extra mile’ including service quality, administration, financials and ‘value for money’.

  • Gold

The Gold Award can only be achieved via an unannounced visit. This award rewards the consistent delivery of a high standard of service with excellent supporting operational practices.

  • Platinum

This is the most prestigious of the 4 tiers.

The Platinum Award is built on the criteria for the CAP Gold standing. To qualify for CAP Platinum eligibility, an organisation must have achieved their CAP Gold Awards in three successive years for the assessed discipline: housekeeping or catering. The overall criteria are more demanding with the scoring expectations being above 95% on the overall assessment score.The aim is simply to demonstrate the consistency of the service quality to patients and staff across a longer period of time.

Who can apply for the CAP Awards programme?

Any healthcare or education organisation who seeks recognition for their housekeeping or catering service and who want to improve staff motivation to continuously strive to advance their service delivery in these areas.

Not in healthcare or education but committed to improving housekeeping or catering standards? Hotels, gyms and nurseries, for example, may wish to take a look at our Clean Safe Standard or get in touch to see how we might help.

Where do we start?

First decide if you want to focus on Housekeeping and cleaning only? Just Catering? Or both Housekeeping / Cleaning and Catering? If you are not sure, simply arrange a call with one of our experts to discuss your thoughts.

Once you’ve decided which discipline you want to focus on, just let us know and we’ll appoint one of our experts in that discipline to arrange a visit to your premises.

Our assessor will visit and spend a full day at your premises. The CAP Awards assessor will spend a full day at your premises, working through a rigorous checklist of tasks, verifying the actual service delivery and measuring the standards of performance. They will delve deep into the practicalities of the operation, scrutinise the detail, and benchmark your key performance indicators against industry norms.

Following this full analysis, you will receive a membership pack which includes:

  • A CAP Award for those who reach the Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Bronze milestones.
  • A comprehensive report detailing an action plan for improvement.
  • Marketing and social media support.
  • Access to 12 months' office-based support with up-dates, useful ‘tools of the trade’, benchmarks and practical operationally based advice for the award holder to implement.
  • Inclusion in the CAP Awards 'Core Skill Awareness’ programme, including its fortnightly distribution of useful reminders on the day-to-day tasks completed within the departments.

How much does it cost?

The investment to join this pioneering industry-leading service starts from £2,550 + VAT for the 12-month development programme, just £212.50 per month (exc. VAT). It will change your organisation and the people and teams within it for the better. As a participant in the CAP Awards programme, we will get you to where you want to be.

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