Care Agencies

Overview

QCS Compliance Centre for Domiciliary Care enables home care agencies to tackle some of the most problematic aspects of delivering high-quality home care services. Delivered by a dispersed workforce without close supervision, domiciliary care services are more likely to suffer from inconsistent practice and standards. It is a matter of some complexity for home care service providers to bring best practice together with compliance without expertise in the CQC regulatory framework.

How can QCS help?

Our comprehensive QCS Compliance Centre is designed to meet the needs of home care agencies, enabling compliance with Care Quality Commission (CQC) and inspection. QCS Compliance Centre is organised as modules and product packs for each specific area of practice and is supplied as an online service. This combination allows maximum flexibility in disseminating standardised service practice across your dispersed workforce. QCS Compliance Centre is originated and maintained centrally by a team, experts in domiciliary care practice and the applicable legislative and regulatory code. We update the online system whenever the regulatory code or best practice changes. This enables you to ensure the care your workforce delivers remains in step with compliant practice. There is an increased need for care workers to deliver some aspects of care that were once the preserve of nurses. Care planning is a fundamental requirement. The QCS Compliance Centre guides care workers through the care planning process, ensures nothing is omitted and ultimately enables high quality CQC compliant care to be delivered to every service user.

The QCS Compliance Centre also helps to address the other issues of your dispersed remote workforce, including overcoming communication issues and providing better access to support and advice. QCS Compliance Centre resources also facilitate training and development and coaching and mentoring, both important factors for improving standards and retaining staff.

Overview

Being a Domiciliary Care Manager, you must be knowledgeable about the need to complete risk assessments & quality audits for your service. Discovering how your care agency processes are performed will impact your service users and the organisation overall.

The QCS Risk Assessment Module has 4 built-in categories to help you run your business effectively: Business Operations, Communications, Finance, Registration & Compliance.

Overview

Obtaining successful registration with the CQC is, as numerous domiciliary care providers know, only half of the story. Making sure your agency continues providing excellent care is mostly based on successfully passing your CQC inspections. Failure to pass a CQC inspection may have severe implications, e.g. Shutting down your services.

This kind of motion may obstruct the stability of your domiciliary care agency, so ensuring the appropriate policies and procedures are in place to offer all current service users with the absolute best care is very vital. Effectively making use of QCS Compliance Centre allows you to move you immeasurably in the direction of accomplishing this goal.

We have a toolkit for every Key Line of Enquiry (KLOEs) under the five key questions:

• Is the service SAFE?
• Is the service EFFECTIVE?
• Is the service CARING?
• Is the service RESPONSIVE?
• Is the service WELL–LED?

Each toolkit is made of three parts:

• Evidence – Planning, gathering feedback, talking to people, observation, and records
• Evidence Checklist – A simple tool to help you with the data and figure out any areas that require improvement
• Action Plan – Plan the actions needed to deliver outcomes. The toolkit has been developed to help identify areas of concern and take measures to address them appropriately before the CQC inspects. It is a proactive tool to make sure you stay ahead of the game and work perfectly into a Good or Outstanding rating.

Overview

The responsibilities of domiciliary care managers according to safety applies to each individual living and working at the care home. It is important to ensure you have clear policies with regard to both.

The QCS Safeguarding module is consistently improved so that it’s updated when it comes to current best practices.

This allows you to:

• Be certain that all procedures are in place for the correct reporting of suspicions of misuse or harm to service users.
• Possess a management system in place to make sure that the review of abuse and a care plan process is put in place with the appropriate measure to safeguard the individual from any additional harm.
• Advise employees about laws and regulations you can use to safeguard and assist service users and the staff who look after them.
• Handle risk in a way that balances out service users’ rights and your obligation of care.

Overview

Hygiene

All care employees must wash their hands before and after dealing with food products. All food items must also be cleaned prior to use. Those who are working in the food management area must keep a top level of personal hygiene and food handlers must put on appropriate neat and wear suitable, safety clothing.

Catering

The QCS Residential Services Module compiles all the essential policies required for a compliant catering service.

The Catering area is split into two classes: Catering Services and Hygiene. In those categories you will find policies, procedures and checklists to assist with:

• Catering Stocks
• Uniforms
• Kitchen Safety
• Menu Choice
• Cleaning Schedule and Audit
• Cross Contamination
• Food Hygiene
• Risk Assessment & Safety

Within our Risk Assessment category under the Residential Services, you can find the ‘CCTV and use of hidden cameras’ policy and procedure.

Overview

The QCS Mock Inspection Toolkit is an excellent solution to assist with quality assurance in domiciliary care agencies. In accordance with the CQC Fundamental Standards, the Mock Inspection Toolkit offers a vital quality assurance initiative which helps you to comprehend the degree to which your service is CQC compliant.

It’s an undeniable fact that every domiciliary care provider will be inspected sooner or later by the regulator; so why hold back until it is too late for taking corrective action? The purpose of the toolkit is to find any weak areas in the services that your agency provides. The Registered Manager should seek to complete Mock Inspections on a regular basis to track progress and act if improvements are required.

The QCS Mock Inspection Toolkit includes a selection of useful workbooks and recommendations allowing you to go over inspections, evaluate your performance level and set yourself targets for growth.

Overview

All domiciliary care services are required to make sure that medicines are received, handled, stored, administered, discarded and documented in line with statutory and regulatory requirements, in addition to best practice recommendations.

Medicine records are essential in every domiciliary care service. If you look after medicines for the people you care for at any given time, you should be able to identify the medicines prescribed for each person and how much they have left.

The QCS Medications Management Module effectively achieves compliance in this challenging area. The QCS medication audit tool assists you in ensuring this is the case while the medication risk assessment forms ensure that risk areas won’t be neglected. This module is made to assist with managing medications in the care service with full confidence through a reliable and secure medications policy.

Overview

Infection Control in domiciliary care organisations is among one of the top objectives. Every carer must be competent in Infection Control, so they have knowledge of what it is, ways to avoid infections in the care home and what to do if a client has an infection and above all how to deal with it.

It is essential to implement the right infection control policies and procedures, both with the Infection Control Policy and Procedure and the infection control procedures embedded through QCS Compliance Centre.

The QCS Infection Control Module is consistently updated so that it is current with all regulatory changes for best practices. This allows you to:

• Perform appropriate risk assessments that detail the true risks found within the care home.
• Develop and employ a reporting system allowing care workers and Service Users to report and record all incidents which may compromise infection control.
• Continuously evaluate current policies and practices to ensure they stay up to date and fit for purpose.

Overview

The success of any organisation will depend on its staff members; even more so in a delicate sector like health and social care, therefore recruiting the ideal employees and then handling employee relationships, is an essential element in getting long-lasting success.

It will likely be challenging to positively answer most of the CQC Key Questions (The Mum Test) and KLOEs without the appropriate staff to assist you.

The QCS Human Resources Module is a complete source of recruiting, managing and keeping your staff members including policies and procedures which includes: Absence, Holidays and Sickness, Contracts of Employment, Equality and Disability, Job Descriptions, Performance and Discipline, Recruitment, Induction and Training.

Overview

Accidents occur daily in even the most safety-conscious environments. Domiciliary care providers really need to correctly manage every aspect of health and safety. The well-being of Service Users and employees may be put in jeopardy by neglecting to put sufficient procedures in place. For this reason, it is very important to put into action the correct health and safety systems and policies. The QCS Health and Safety Module is continually improved to keep it up to date and in step with regulatory change and adaptations to best practices, including Quality Assurance requirements.

User-friendly risk assessment, habitual incident reporting and analysis which deliver awareness are all central to great health and safety. This module allows you to:

• To execute risk assessments which find out the real risks inside the domiciliary care environment.
• Create and make use of a reporting system that helps ensure all accidents and incidents are reported and noted by employees.
• Continually review your policies and practices to ensure they are up-to-date and fit for purpose.

Overview

To help new domiciliary care agencies with the CQC registration, QCS has developed a CQC Registration Module which offers you all the policies, procedures and guidance you must have to effectively fulfil the essential requirements for domiciliary care registration.

Successfully registering and managing a domiciliary care service requires policies and procedures to be compliant. The CQC Registration Module contains policies and procedures that go over all compliance-related activities. The following categories are covered: Administration; CQC Compliance; Care Management; Health and Safety; Human Resources; Catering; Maintenance; and Quality Assurance.

These policies help to create the foundation of how your organisation operates, assisting you to confidently carry out your domiciliary care registration with the Care Quality Commission.

Overview

By making use of our care plan template, you are able to develop care plans which are simpler to maintain. The care plan template ensures you complete documentation that complies with current CQC Fundamental Standards, and QCS Compliance Centre also provides communication tools that are effective in practice. We provide you with the template you need to complete a comprehensive and thorough care plan, which is a significant piece of evidence needed to answer many of your CQC KLOEs.

Be sure to read through the guidance relating to our care plan management provision and find out how our care plan examples can be used to adhere to best practices in this area of care.

Overview

The General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (“GDPR”) is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years and if it’s not already on your organisation’s agenda, now is the time to act.

The aim of GDPR is to protect personal information that any living individual provides to any organisation, including care and nursing homes, care agencies and medical practitioners and to ensure that the personal information is kept safe, secure and is used appropriately. It will replace the current UK law, the Data Protection Act 1998 (“DPA”). Many believe that the DPA no longer provides appropriate or sufficient protection for an individual’s personal information.

GDPR applies to any organisation that processes personal data relating to a data subject. It applies to all organisations including, for example, public authorities, not for profit organisations, limited companies, trusts, charities and sole traders. All organisations must comply with GDPR and may need to take steps and implement new processes and procedures to achieve such compliance by 25 May 2018.

QCS is producing and releasing all the documents you need to support your understanding of what GDPR means for you, and to make sure you are ready and prepared for its arrival. By 25 May 2018, the following policies & procedures will be available on your QCS Compliance Centre:

• GDPR – An Overarching Policy
• Initial Privacy Impact Assessment
• Appointing a Data Protection Officer
• Data Security and Retention
• Website Privacy Policy & Procedure
• Subject Access Requests – Internal Policy & Procedure
• Subject Access Requests – Process Map
• Subject Access Requests – Request Letter
• Breach Notification – Internal Policy & Procedure
• Breach Notification – Process Map
• Fair Processing Notice Policy & Procedure
• Consent Form
• Privacy Impact Assessment (“PIA”)
• Privacy Impact Assessment – An Explanatory Policy