In 2018, the Care Inspectorate began developing quality frameworks for different types of care settings. They began with the framework for Care Homes for older people and launched the one relevant to us, Support Services (Care at Home including Supported Living Models of Support), thereafter. The quality frameworks help services evaluate themselves, and inspectors use them, too, to evaluate the quality of care during inspections.
Self Evaluation is a powerful tool
The idea behind the frameworks is to support improvement by empowering services to evaluate their own performance. Self-evaluation can be a powerful tool to identify what’s working well and to identify areas for improvement. With this in mind we at Potential Living formed our own Self Evaluation group to help us improve outcomes for the people we support. The group has been meeting regularly for almost two years now and has representation from focus people, family members and staff from within the organisation at every level.
An on-going process
We meet to reflect, chat, have conversations, and challenge ourselves in an effort to make a positive difference in our Focus People’s lives by delivering better outcomes for them. Rather than viewing Self Evaluation as a one-off activity to help us prepare for inspection, we decided to engage with it as an ongoing process throughout the year and it has undoubtedly contributed to our continued improvement. This can be evidenced by the findings of our latest inspection and, most importantly, by the feedback we receive from the people we support and their relatives.