The Care Inspectorate is developing new approaches to scrutiny. They want to make sure inspections, and our other scrutiny work, are strongly focused on assessing the quality of people’s experiences, and understanding the difference care and support makes to their lives.
From 1 April 2018, the new Health and Social Care Standards will be used across Scotland. The Care Inspectorate’s expectation is that they will be used in planning, commissioning, assessment, and delivering care and support. They will be used in making decisions about care quality. This means that there will be changes in how care and support are inspected.
During 2018, on an incremental basis, the Care Inspectorate will roll-out a revised methodology for inspecting care and support services, starting with care homes for older people. The changes will build on approaches they have introduced in the past three years: an emphasis on experiences and outcomes for people, proportionate approaches in services that perform well, shorter inspection reports, and a focus on supporting improvement in quality.
The core of the new methodology will be a quality framework which sets out the elements that will help inspectors answer key questions about how good the quality of care and support is, what difference it is making, and the strength of the things that contribute to that.
The primary purpose of a quality framework is to support services to self-evaluate their own performance. The same framework is then used by inspectors to provide independent assurance about the quality of care and support. By setting out what is expected in high-quality care and support provision, it can help support improvement too. Using a framework in this way also supports openness and transparency of the inspection process.
The Care Inspectorate have involved people who experience and provide care and support in developing a draft quality framework. This is based on the approach used by the European Foundation for Quality Management, specifically the EFQM excellence model. This is a quality tool widely used across sectors and countries. They have adapted the model for use in care and support settings, and have used the new Health and Social Care Standards to illustrate the quality they expect to see. The framework was tested in a small number of care homes in 2017, and more tests are being carried out in early 2018. These tests will be evaluated to hear the views of people experiencing care, their carers, and care providers.
What are the Care Inspectorate consulting about?
The Care Inspectorate are inviting you to look at the draft quality framework they have developed for care homes for older people, and to complete their consultation survey. Your feedback, and the evaluations of the tests, will help shape the final quality framework for care homes for older people in April 2018.
You can access the draft framework and consultation survey here: http://cinsp.in/QFsurvey
Please respond by 23 February.
Scottish Care will also be responding to the consultation. If you would like your comments to be incorporated into our response, please contact: [email protected]
