It's important to assess, measure and evaluate the quality of your service in order to improve.
There are lots of guidelines and standards to help you to assess quality in your service. This will help you to identify specific actions to deliver against Making it Real.
Don’t try to do everything at once - think about what quality means to you and your service, and pick a couple of areas that you would like to assess – the people who use your service, families and staff can help you to identify these areas.
These resources will help you to think about how to assess quality in your service.
Single Assessment Framework
The CQC uses their Single Assessment Framework to assess whether regulated health and social care services are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led, and provide a baseline for good and outstanding care. You can use the CQC Quality statements to reflect on whether your service meets the required quality standards, identify what to improve and plan improvements to meet the standards. Skills for Care has produced a range of resources and tools to support adult social care employers meet these new expectations.
Guidance, NICE advice and quality standards
The Guidance, NICE advice and quality standards make evidence-based recommendations about what works and what's good value for money, to help health and social care practitioners to improve practice and quality. Adult social care registered managers can be confident they're providing the best quality care if they use NICE guidelines.
Quality improvement resources for adult social care
The NICE Quality improvement resource for adult social care maps NICE quality statements and medicines recommendations against the KLOEs.
It supports adult social care commissioners and providers to navigate NICE statements and recommendations, and gives helpful indicators or actions that could address the KLOEs. Commissioners can also include relevant content in service contracts and specifications.
Measuring quality can be hard, so ensure that you choose ways to measure quality that are easy for you to compare.
The following resources will help you to think about how you can measure quality in your service.
NICE standards and indicators
The NICE standards and indicators set out the priority areas for quality improvement within a range of areas of care and support, such as dementia care, physical activity, learning disability, medicines support and community engagement. Each standard gives you a set of statements to help you to improve quality and provides quality measures to help you to monitor the statements.
NICE baseline asssessment tools
The NICE baseline assessment tools can be used by adult social care employers to evaluate current practice and plan activity to meet NICE recommendations. They can be used by individual services, or by groups of services, to develop a picture of activity in the local area.
Review of CQC’s impact on quality and improvement in health and social care
CQC inspections are a great way to collect data and feedback about the quality of care that your service provides. The inspection report gives you a good measure of the quality of your service against the required standards.
The Review of CQC’s impact on quality and improvement in health and social care, published 2017 by CQC, evaluates the impact that CQC has on quality and improvement in health and social care – and suggests that the quality of care is improving with CQC’s involvement.
Integrated Commissioning for Better Outcomes: a commissiong framework
The Integrated Commissioning for Better Outcomes: a commissioning framework, developed jointly by LGA and NHS Clinical Commissioners in 2018, updates and builds on the Commissioning for Better Outcomes Framework 2015 which was designed to support local health and care economies to strengthen their integrated commissioning for the benefit of local people.
The framework covers four areas: building the foundations, taking a person-centred, place-based and outcomes-focused approach, shaping provision to support people, places and populations, and continuously raising the ambition and can help registered managers to understand how commissioners think about integration and commissioning for integration.
Knowing if the actions you've taken have improved quality will be dependent on how open people are when they give you feedback.
As you reflect on your actions to improve quality, keep the Making it Real themes in mind. Use the I and We statements to assess how and whether quality has improved for people using your service(s).
- Living the life I want, keeping safe and well.
- Having the information I need, when I need it.
- Keeping family, friends and connections.
- My own support, my own way.
- Staying in control.
- The people who support me.
The following resources will help you to think about how you'll know if the actions you've taken have improved quality.
Making it Real
Making it Real, from Think Local Act Personal, sets out six statements that are most important to people who need care and support, that you can use as a measure of good practice. You could ask the people that you support whether they agree with each statement – if they do, this is a good indicator that the actions that you’ve taken have improved quality.
Beyond barriers: how older people move between health and social care in England
Beyond barriers: how older people move between health and social care in England, published in 2018 by CQC, shares learning from a programme of targeted local system reviews in local authority areas, to find out how services are working together to support and care for people aged 65 and over. It makes recommendations for national and local leaders, to suggest the scale and pace of improvement needed for people to have better experiences when they use a combination of health and social care services.