Skills for Care
Top

Single Assessment Framework version

All services - change

GO Online: Inspection toolkit

Print this page

Treating people as individuals

The CQC will expect everybody you care for to be treated as an individual, with support shaped around their own preferences. Understanding what is important to an individual is essential, including meeting their personal, cultural, social, and religious needs.

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 Treating people as individuals

Duration 01 min 41 sec

Everybody you support will have their own needs and preferences that will be important to them.

The CQC will want to know how your services treats everybody you support as an individual and how you enable your staff team to demonstrate this in the care that they provide.

How you involve people, their families, and potentially their advocates in understanding their backgrounds and shaping care around cultural beliefs and other factors important to them will need to be demonstrated.

The inspection may focus on people’s protected characteristics, including support provided related to age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

Inspectors may also explore what have you done to protect people’s human rights. Having examples at hand and evidence to share will be important.

Of course, there will be cross-over with other areas of inspection, most likely around assessing need and person-centred care. The evidence you provide and associated documentation will need to be consistent.

CQC inspectors will want to interview people, their families, friends and advocates to better understand how the person is treated as an individual. Observations will also occur in some care environments.

To help you meet this area of CQC inspection, take a look at the recommendations, examples, and resources available in GO Online.

Watch the film here: https://vimeo.com/787631241

Recommendations

These recommendations act as a checklist to what the CQC will be looking for. Skills for Care has reviewed hundreds of inspection reports and identified these recommendations as recurring good practice in providers that meet CQC expectations.

The CQC is non-prescriptive, which means they don’t tell you what must be done in order to meet their Quality Statement. These recommendations are not intended to be a definitive list and some recommendations might not be relevant to your service. We hope they help you reflect on what evidence you might wish to share with the CQC.

Treating people as individuals

  • We can evidence how the care and support we provide meets each person’s individual needs.
  • We ensure that people are central to care decisions that are appropriate to their personal, cultural, social, and religious needs.
  • We are committed to ensuring equality, inclusion, and human rights principles are central to the care we provide.
  • Our managers and staff team understand people’s protected characteristics and how to provide care that meets these needs.
  • We ensure our staff team receive training in equality and diversity and this is regularly refreshed so they know about the latest good practice.
  • We use effective and clearly communicated policies and procedures to ensure people aren’t discriminated against on the grounds of a wide range of diverse needs.
  • We prioritise understanding the preferences of the people we support and their needs in terms of assistance from our staff, their family, friends and/or advocates.
  • We actively engage with the wider community to help raise awareness of the dignity, equality and diversity needs (e.g., raising awareness of disability issues at an open day event, speaking out about hate crime in the local press).
  • Where appropriate, we involve families, friends, and advocates in supporting people to make decisions about their care.
  • We ensure our managers and leaders create an open, relaxed environment where people, relatives and advocates can talk comfortably together.
  • We’re proactive in sharing information about the wider help, specialist assistance and advocacy available to the people we support, their family and friend's support.
  • We recognise and celebrate different religions and cultures, including key dates and events.

Developed in partnership with