Achieving outstanding CQC inspection results in your care service

If you’re facing tightening budgets and an increased demand for efficiency, understanding the specifics of how your care service runs is essential. If you’re facing the scrutiny of a CQC inspection, understanding and being able to portray how your care service runs is also essential. Modern systems play a fundamental role in supporting care services to achieve these aims. From acting as a central database to helping software users collate and interrogate the data they need, having the right care management software in place can make reporting and your CQC inspection that much easier.

Displaying accurate data depends upon accurate data capture. By giving prominence to data within your care service, you can help to ensure its smooth transition from the point of recording through to displaying it in reporting dashboards across your organisation.

Your data, displayed your way

Being able to easily access, examine and report on the data produced across your services is important in understanding care delivery, what’s working and what can be improved. This covers point of care delivery through to financial management.

It is, therefore, important to provide each user with easy access to the data they need. Your care management software provider should be able to help you here. Certa, for example, is provided with a suite of out of the box reporting and dashboards. These cover the areas of your operation that you need, with the ability for you to self-serve and create your own reports and dashboards. Of course, our team is on hand to assist you when you need.

If that sounds daunting, system training is readily available to those who need it and is covered at the point of implementation.

This gives you the freedom to interrogate your data your way, not just work with a one size fits all solution.

Understand your care services

With robust and bespoke reporting mechanisms in place, you can truly get under the bonnet of your care services. What is working well? What could be improved? Where can efficiencies be found?

Only with the right software supporting you can you answer those questions.

Okay, so what do I need to be looking at?

To get you started, Certa provides the following reporting tools upon implementation, although you can set up bespoke reports or fall back on our team to help you:

• Operational management: Future staff usage, unplanned visit analysis, missed visits, real-time care worker analysis, my tasks (what the user has to complete) and staff compliance (e.g. key accreditations and where they might be expiring).
• Client management: A full overview of each client’s timeline, covering previous and planned visits, actions taken and billing.
• Financial management: Full timesheet reporting with an audit trail of authorisations for timely and accurate billing and pay.
• System administration: A complete audit of system users and admin trails.
• Senior management: Profitability reporting and business insights.
• Client portal: Planned and delivered care with the ability for clients, their friends and family and to see what has happened and what is planned for future visits.

How does this help with CQC inspections?

The CQC, at the point of inspection of your services, will ask five key questions in line with its single assessment framework (SAF). Is you service safe? Effective? Caring? Responsive to people’s needs? Well led?

Whilst parts of the assessment comprise speaking with your staff, opening up your service to inspectors greatly assists in transparently laying out how you work. From here, you can evidence that visits are being conducted by trained, compliant staff in a timely manner, that you consider and respond to the needs of your clients and that you provide the best possible environment in which your carers can succeed in delivering services.

This demonstrates that you’re safe, effective, responsive and well led. To help you with this, we’ve put together a comprehensive CQC inspection checklist, which you can get for free here.

Conclusion

With the aim of your service doubtless being outstanding care delivery to your clients, being able to easily monitor this constantly helps to keep your services on track all the time.

Making reporting and analysis part of your business process makes your services constantly transparent. This makes it easier to identify patterns in your business, understanding what’s working well and what could be improved.

It further helps in demonstrating the quality of your services to prospective clients. CQC inspections are irregular and imperfect as a means of showcasing suitability to clients, so being able to put an arm around their shoulder with aspects such as a friends and family portal makes your services transparent to your clients, too.

You have all the necessary information on your services already, but it’s making it easily accessible and transparent that’s often the difficult part. Certa aims to make this straightforward, putting reporting and insight front and centre of your care management software.

Check out our CQC checklist for a comprehensive guide to preparing for inspections, and head to www.caci.co.uk/certa for more information on Certa.