The outcome is clear and has been recognised with consistency by every important external stakeholder group. Recently a local authority officer, responsible for placing people for support said they “have found New Directions to be a well led and effective service that goes over and above their remit to provide an effective service for the client.”
While a commissioner commented that they were “very impressed with the quality of the staff at New Directions, they have a strong and consistent staff team which I believe is very helpful for the service users.”
Innovation – The CQC’s view
A recent CQC inspection of one of New Direction’s locations “Woodhurst” drew the same conclusions, but it also gave fresh and rich insight into the innovative steps New Directions have taken to improve their services. They were immediately rated Outstanding.
The CQC recognised that this innovative approach to working has enabled staff to provide the highest quality support possible. In short, they have the freedom to do more, to give more quality, face to face support.
Managers, meanwhile, now spend less time carrying out audits and more time looking at both the real-time and historic outcomes of their services, to make incremental improvements that make an immense difference collectively.
And the clients using the service are now able to be much more involved with their own support.
New Directions aim for a service that is ‘co-produced’, meaning that clients have a leading role in designing their own support. Once more, the steps taken by New Directions to innovate have helped in this regard, as the CQC inspector made clear in their report:
"In the case of one person, there has been a significant improvement which has changed from a total lack of engagement with staff to taking almost full control of their own support plan. This meant that the person led on what was included in their support plan including setting their own goals saying how they would achieve them, timings, as well as engagement and social events."
This turnaround was made possible by using the most appropriate software; digital care planning.
Critically, this supported living software reduces the amount of time care and support workers spend completing admin. This gives them more time to spend actually delivering their care, doing the work they came into care to do. Again from Woodhurst’s CQC inspection:
“The electronic system used allowed management to spend considerably more time with people and staff to focus on the quality of support instead of spending time completing audits and action plans. People told us that the use of technology has enabled staff to spend more time with them and develop more innovative ideas.”
In this video, hear from some of the team at New Directions, on why they wanted to change the way they work and if they’ve achieved what they set out to.
It answers many burning questions that providers of supported living, or indeed any care service, often have:
On top of giving staff more time to do the important things, this software also improves compliance and personalisation:
“The system alerted and allocated tasks to staff members for completion. Therefore there were no missed tasks or support for people. It also allowed staff to completely personalise every document and process within the system.”
Through better, more efficient auditing, the software gives you both the extra time and information needed to make genuinely effective improvements to the services you provide:
“The registered manager used a software package that provided an innovative monitoring and auditing system. It enabled new ideas to be explored and developed to improve the service.”