We interviewed Dave James, Head of Adult Social Care Policy at the CQC. Dave talked to us about how using digital home care management software can help with CQC inspections, how it enables measurement and how it can help deliver outstanding care.
His advice is important to home care agencies considering using digital technology to help increase their business’s efficiencies and deliver high quality care.
Read through the interview here (we’ve slightly edited the text to help it read better in the context of an article) or watch the video below.
How can technology and management software help home care companies improve their inspection ratings?
“In terms of inspection [home care software] can be a great source of evidence. Our inspectors talk about how valuable it is to see the step-by-step detail into care, understanding how people get care that it’s not rushed.
“It’s also a good way of helping the provider ensure more uniformity in how records are managed and how information flows and how hat uniformity can go on to support great consistency in the standard of care. Software is also a great way of seeing how the provider has information that it gleans from tech and actually learns from that to improve the service.
“So that’s the mechanics of how the evidence is presented. In terms of the rating and what our view will be there are probably four things that we consider that will influence the rating.
- The first thing is that we want to see that technologies have been deployed with the person that it affects at the heart – person centred care.
There are lots of great tools but ultimately it’s about making sure the person gets the best possible care. - We want to know that there is a clear ambition [in using the tool] and that the provider has thought about what they want to achieve, how they’re going to measure it and how they know that they have achieved it.
- We would be keen to understand how people have been involved. That’s a bit broader than the people that are using the service themselves. It is about how staff are involved, how families are involved and what will the impact be on them and how can they best be involved in how care is implemented – what ongoing support might those people need.
- The fourth thing is are there any legal considerations, any safety considerations and where there are those risks how you plan to go about mitigating them.
What is your advice for agencies that software like CareLineLive in terms of how they should prepare and get ready for CQC inspections?
“From a practical point of view one of the issues we hear about in both residential and domiciliary care is that our inspectors are not necessarily able to access the information they need when paper records need to be printed off.
“So will our inspectors be able to access the information they need when they come to do the inspection?
“But I think more important than that is to really consider the CQC ratings characteristics and think about how does the tech you are using support that outstanding standard of care that we are describing in those characteristics. So it’s really to focus on those and that’s what we will focus on to get the conversations going.”
Choose CareLineLive to help you with your next CQC inspection
As our MD, Josh Hough says at the end of the above interview, CareLineLive is a total care management system that helps you become more efficient, more effective and deliver better care. There’s a full suite of compliance tools which mean that you can be inspection ready at any time.
Contact us for more information and a demonstration.
