Embedding a culture of care in your homecare business.

Care is the centre of the homecare industry. However, as the pandemic has impacted many homecare businesses, now more than ever, it’s important to understand how CQC guidelines can help you to create a culture of care in your business.

In this blog, we discuss the CQC’s key lines of enquiry and how businesses can use them to push industry care standards forward.

Meeting CQC standards

The past few years have been extremely challenging, especially for homecare businesses. 2022 statistics show that 56% of carers felt the dignity and independence of those they cared for was negatively impacted by the lockdown. The CQC also stated that the 17 recommendations made in 2020 to improve the quality of care for complex needs service users had not been achieved by 2022.

As the UK moves past the pandemic era, it’s important to think about how homecare businesses can continually improve standards and create a culture of care in line with CQC standards.

Although businesses and carers may be worried about getting an ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ rating, grasping the key lines of enquiry and incorporating these standards all year round will help CQC visits become a learning opportunity of how to efficiently provide the best possible quality of care.

Understanding the key lines of enquiry

There are currently five key lines of enquiry that the CQC will examine your business against during their visit:

1.   Safe

The most essential aspect of your homecare business is the safeguarding of your service users. This should be applied to all your systems to protect your service users. The CQC will judge whether your systems are suitable for the protection of your service users and how you are learning from your mistakes. You may use eMARs to improve service delivery and reduce medication mistakes, for example.

2.   Effective

Effectiveness focuses on the outcomes of your care, treatment and support. For this standard, the CQC is looking to see how your care is delivered against current legislation. They also want to see how homecare businesses are dedicated to improving outcomes for service users. As paperless systems can automatically generate reports needed for care regulators, they will evidence how you’re continually improving throughout the year.

3.   Caring

For this line of enquiry, the CQC wants to see proof that service users are treated with kindness, compassion, dignity and respect by your staff. You’ll need to show them how your business ensures this quality of care and respects the privacy and independence of your service users. Digital systems can offer much more transparency in comparison to traditional systems, giving you insight to ensure this quality of care is continuous.  

4.   Responsive

Rather than providing a one blanket type of care for all your service users, this line of enquiry considers meeting people’s individual needs. Digital care plans can help to ensure your carers are responding to the unique needs of a service user.

5.   Well-led

This final line of enquiry needs a vision and strategy that supports the delivery of high-quality care to your service users, encourages a positive culture within your business and demonstrates how your service learns, improves and innovates.

Embodying a culture of care

To ensure these five lines of enquiry are all ticked off by your next CQC visit, start by reviewing where you currently are.

If the outcome of your last inspection was a ‘good’ rating, you shouldn’t be inspected for the next 30 months. However, this doesn’t mean you should sit back and relax. A culture of care needs the continuous improvement of care standards.

Consider evaluating your last report to find any areas you could improve on – even if that’s to move from a ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’ rating. If you’re unsure of where to start, review your business against local and national averages, for example, for staff turnover rate, staff qualifications or customer satisfaction.

You don’t need to wait until a CQC visit to measure the quality of your care. By using a digital system, you can conveniently gather data regarding care plans, your workforce, staff complaints and incident reviews. This will help you to recognise and resolve any problems before the CQC picks up on it.

Make sure you can demonstrate your improvements along the way to ensure your hard work between visits is recognised. 

The difference

Embedding a culture of care is about much more than just gaining more profit. By focusing on the CQC lines of enquiry day to day, and not just for inspections, you can improve your service users’ and staff’s experience to improve your company’s growth, team retention and overall quality of care.

For more information on how to innovate your homecare business and embed a culture of care through your systems, get in touch.