GO Online: Inspection toolkit

Supporting people to live healthier lives

Keeping people healthy and supporting them to make informed choices is part of delivering effective care. The CQC will want to know how your service supports people to manage their health and wellbeing, including living as healthy a life as possible.

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 Supporting people to live healthier lives

Duration 01 min 41 sec

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.

Supporting people to live healthier lives

We can evidence how we successfully support people to manage their own health and wellbeing.
We enable and empower the people we support to maintain good health and wellbeing. Where capacity permits, they take an active role in monitoring their own health and help prevent or minimise deterioration.
We provide accessible and timely information to people, their families, and advocates to help them make choices about their future health and wellbeing.
Where needed, we empower staff to act as advocates for people when engaging with healthcare professionals, support organisations and other agencies.
We train and develop our staff to ensure their own understanding of health and wellbeing is in line with the latest best practice.
We are proactive in promoting new health options to the people we support, ensuring they understand the options available. For example, the latest vaccination opportunities.
Where we support people’s food and nutritional needs, we ensure we provide nutritious foods in line with cultural and dietary requirement, and preferences.
To support people to maintain good physical and mental wellbeing, we ensure they have regular access to meaningful activities and wider community engagement.
We provide opportunities for our staff to develop their expertise using national qualifications and good/best practice programmes (where applicable for the levels of care needed).
Where practical, we develop internal champions to help promote healthy options and act as referral and support to the wider staff team.
We’re proactive in engaging with healthcare services (e.g., speech and language therapy, community psychiatric nurses, dieticians, specialist nurses etc.).
We have documented evidence of how we engage people and others in relation to people’s health and care needs. This includes our ongoing monitoring of health and care.
The people we support can access mental health services, including crisis support, when they need them. This is in accordance with NICE Quality Standards.
We ensure the people we support receive regular, high-quality oral healthcare and this is documented in their care plan. This is in accordance with NICE Quality Standards.

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