Who are registered managers and nominated individuals?

Our CEO, Sharon Allen, asks registered managers and nominated individuals to take part in some new research into their everyday experiences as leaders.

Registered managers I meet around the country regularly tell me about the importance of staying up-to-date, sharing best practice and focusing on continuous improvement.

Nominated individuals hold a key relationship with the Care Quality Commission (CQC); and whether it’s through our own experiences and discussions, or by taking a look at national statistics, we know how important registered managers are.

Now we’re asking registered managers and nominated individuals to help Skills for Care by offering us their hard won experience and ideas for improvement through a national survey.

It’s a commonly used statistic - and well worth repeating – that contrary to the often negative media reports about social care, the first two years of CQC’s new inspection process found more than 90% of services getting good or outstanding in ‘well-led’ were rated good or outstanding overall.

We need to know more about these key groups of workers who offer strong leadership day in and day out to provide high quality services across our sector, working with the millions of people who access care and support in our nation.

So maybe you’re a manager or nominated individual (or maybe you employ one or both or many) and If you are (or you do), then you will know about your needs or the needs of your team.

What are the common themes across the sector around where managers and nominated individuals come from, their day to day experiences and what they need to improve themselves and their services?

These might seem like obvious questions, and we do know a lot about registered managers and nominated individuals. But when you look at the research available on the backgrounds, motivations and skill sets of these key leaders you see a different picture.

The paper ‘Care Home Managers: a scoping review of evidence’ revealed that “very little is known about the practice, experiences and skills of care home managers”. The same review notes that from a research perspective more is known about care home managers than those in other services; and we know that less still is known about nominated individuals.

We need to know more because nothing stands still. For registered managers the turnover and vacancy rates associated with the role are 23% and 11% respectively, and we expect that as many as 10,000 registered managers may retire in the next 15 years. For nominated individuals, the CQCs plans to look more closely at strategic leadership as part of inspection may have an impact on that role.

With those changes in mind it’s obvious to me that as well as providing support to registered managers and nominated individuals we need to know much more. We need to know about where they come from, what makes them choose to do the incredible job they do, how they do that job and the skills they needed to develop when they started out, as well as how they keep up-to-date with best practice.

And it follows that the best people to tell us this are registered managers and nominated individuals themselves. So if you’re reading this, please take the time to complete the survey here. If you’re a registered manager or nominated individual, staying up-to-date and sharing best practice is important – so please help us do the same.

If you’re a registered manager or nominated individual please complete our survey here before 27 October 2017. All responses will be treated in confidence and we will not contact you unless you give us permission to.

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