CONSISTENCY IS KEY TO SUCCESS OF NEW CQC RATINGS

October 10, 2014

Today's announcement of the new Care Quality Commission ratings system is more likely to succeed if a culture of consistency is at its heart.

The decision to rate homes on a sliding scale, so that residents and their loved ones can discriminate easily between local providers, is a smart move.

And asking if a particular care home is safe, caring, effective, responsive to the residents’ needs and well-led, will ensure inspections are providing an insightful picture of the service on offer.

But what will truly set great homes apart, and help families feel confident in their choice of care provider, is knowing that ‘mum’ and / or ‘dad’ will get ‘outstanding care’ on a day-to-day basis and trusting that there is delivery of quality over a period of time.

At the CAP Awards we help care providers improve standards in the essential services of catering and housekeeping so that consistency of service is guaranteed.

Crucially we set year-long improvement plans so that providers can continually ensure that they are serving the best quality meals in a clean and welcoming environment.

We go a long way to providing this evidence with the audit criteria being set at legal and ‘best practice’.

And we go one step further in that the service user’s actual experience is recorded and ‘scored’ as they receive it i.e. cleanliness of the premises, the quality of the food on the plate that day. Perhaps the new CQC audit process may take this next step? We will see.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the management of catering and housekeeping is often indicative of the management of the whole site – the canary in the coal mine.

If CQC inspectors pay close attention to ‘inadequate service’ in catering and housekeeping via levels of performance such as staff motivation and hygiene, then they may well be an indicator of the broader performance of the home in question.

The CQC should be applauded for the launch of these new ratings standards which good, and worthy providers, will only benefit from.

For too long the vast majority of excellent care homes have been punished by those who let down the sector with poor performance. Today’s announcement should go some way to starting to raise standards across the board, especially if consistency of quality is core to this new era.

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