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Single Assessment Framework version

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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

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.

Listening to and involving people

  • We can evidence the changes we have made to the care we provide as a result of listening to the needs of the individuals we support.
  • We provide the people we support with multiple opportunities to give feedback (e.g., via regular meetings, via e-mail and phone conversations, surveys etc.).
  • We ensure we act on feedback and complaints received in a professional and prompt manner.
  • We ensure people who have difficulty communicating are enabled to give their views through support provided by all staff. We use communication aids as appropriate in this process.
  • Our service values listening to people’s feedback and reviewing their comments, as part of an open and transparent culture.
  • We help build the confidence of the people we support so that they know if complaints and concerns are raised, they’ll be effectively dealt with.
  • We’ve developed and shared a formal complaints procedure which everyone has a copy of, including all staff and the people we support, their families and friends.
  • We effectively resource those responsible for investigating concerns and complaints.
  • We conduct comprehensive investigations into complaints and concerns, involving additional independent external professionals to assist where needed.
  • Our managers and leaders are actively involved where appropriate with dealing with concerns and complaints.
  • We record the outcome of all feedback whether a change is made or not, and we ensure records are easily accessible.
  • We have a reliable process of communicating the response to feedback to the person who originally raised the issue.
  • We review themes resulting from concerns and complaints so wider learning and improvements can be undertaken.

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