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GO Online: Inspection toolkit

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Listening to and involving people

All adult social care services should expect to receive regular feedback, including concerns and complaints raised by the people you support. You should actively seek feedback – whether good or bad – to help confirm what is going well and potential areas for improvement.

The following film provides a summary of this area of inspection. It can help you and your teams learn about what will be inspected and what is important to demonstrate to deliver good or outstanding care.

Introducing Listening to and involving people

Duration 02 min 00 sec

People need to be actively involved in their day-to-day care. Involving people and listening to their needs is an essential part of delivering Responsive care.

Feedback can help regulated services to know what is going well and respond to areas of concern. As part of the inspection process, the CQC will want to be assured that you are an organisation that listens and acts upon any concerns and complaints to help improve the quality of care.

The CQC inspection focus will look at how you involve people in discussing their care, treatment, and support needs. Inspectors will look at how you support people to raise concerns and complaints … and this may on occasion involve the support of external advocates and those acting on behalf of the individual.

Openness and transparency will be key to encouraging feedback but there is a balance here with the confidentiality of some of the issues that are raised. Your service will need to have systems in place to ensure anybody raising a concern or complaint is protected from discrimination, harassment, or other disadvantages.

In addition to acknowledging the feedback, it will also be important to keep people informed of what you are doing with it and how the care might be changing as a result.

In addition to interviewing managers, your staff team, and the people you support, the CQC inspectors may ask to review various documents when assessing this area including Care plans, Complaints and compliments, Staff training and induction.

GO Online brings together recommendations, examples, and resources to help this area of CQC inspection focus.

Watch the film here: https://vimeo.com/788208768

Practical examples

The examples below provide insight into how other Good or Outstanding rated services are succeeding in this area of inspection. Use the filter to choose different types of examples or select based on related prompt.

If you have an example you would like to share, please e-mail employer.engagement@skillsforcare.org.uk.

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1 example(s) found

Family matters group drawing on ideas from relatives

In this one-minute audio clip from the Care Exchange podcast, Hayley Taylor talks about how their transparent and person-centred approach to listening involves a family matters group with relatives.

You can listen to the full podcast here. Access our whole Care Exchange series here.

Read more about this service here

Care provider: Avenues South East

  • Audio

Date published: January 2023



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