The CQC Key Lines of Enquiry are used by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), who regulate all health and social care providers in England. CQC inspectors use the Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) to guide and direct their inspections of care services. Established and new care providers alike will probably know something about the Key Lines of Enquiry, but few too many understand how the Key Lines of Enquiry fit within the CQC's approach and how they are used during inspections.
Are you looking for the best eMAR to help you manage medications in your care home?
Many care homes are adopting electronic medication administration record (eMAR) systems for more efficient medication management with less medication errors.
At the Access Group, we work with thousands of nursing and residential care providers to help them improve their medication management. We supply a comprehensive suite of care management solutions including our own electronic medication management software.
In this article we will compare three popular medication administration systems on the market: MED e-care eMAR, ATLAS eMAR, and Camascope eMAR. To avoid bias, we will not be including our own product in the comparison.
By comparing the features of each system, we will help you decide which is most suitable for your care home.
Whistleblowing in health and social care shares some common features with whistleblowing in other sectors. Generally speaking a whistleblower is a worker who reports a certain type of wrongdoing that they witness in the workplace. This could be anything from negligence, corruption or another form of malpractice that could put people within the business, whether they’re care providers or service users, at risk.
Whistleblowing is most commonly seen at work, but can also be carried out by concerned members of the public, customers or people using a service, and occurs across a wide range of different industries and sectors.
Whistleblowing in health and social care is extremely important but is still sometimes overlooked by leaders within the sector. Considering that it could protect people and prevent harm, it’s an essential practice to make provision for, that if necessary should be allowed to occur within all kinds of health and social care settings. Having policies and procedures in place is the first step to encouraging your team to blow the whistle when necessary. It is essential that your team know about them and how to make a disclosure.
If you’re still unsure about whistleblowing and why it is so important, we at Access are here to help. To learn more about whistleblowing in health and social care, this article has gone into detail to explain this occurrence, how it can benefit everyone involved and your rights as a whistleblower.
The 6C’s of care are designed inform the culture and practice of health and social care providers. They comprise of 6 care values for employees, leaders, and organisations working in health and social care. The 6C’s place the interests of patients and service users first and foremost.
In this article we will explore the 6C’s of care, why these care values are important, and how following the 6C’s can shape your policies and procedures to help you to become and remain a high-quality care provider.
Empowerment in health and social care can be key to the success and happiness of your service users. In life, there are things we can’t control. These situations can make you feel frustrated, powerless and disheartened. Over time, this can chip away at your confidence and self-esteem, leading to negativity and poor decision-making.
We can make decisions and plans because we have personal power and are in control of our own lives, so what about the people you care for?
Socially isolated people, those with poor or declining health or less autonomy can become fearful of positive risk-taking. The frustrations of not being able to do the things they once loved or simple daily tasks can lead to a loss of independence, assurance and self-empowerment. Fortunately, there are things you can do to help promote empowerment and reduce the risk of these feelings developing in your care service.
To gain a deep understanding of empowerment in health and social care you should download this FREE guide: ‘E is for Empowerment & Engagement’. It takes an in-depth look into both subjects and how they work together to improve the quality of care. These guides are a great resource for care workers, managers and leaders in care and are completely free for you to download.
As you can see, we at The Access Group have digitised and worked with care services across the world for a long time, in fact, we started this journey in health and social care 30 years ago. Over time, we've learned exactly what you need to succeed in care. So, we have put this article together to help you fully understand the importance of empowerment in health and social care, what it is, the factors that can affect it and useful empowerment strategies.
In social care, effective communication goes beyond knowledge and expertise to incorporate every aspect of interaction and experience. Care workers need to have the ability to empathise when needed and talk about potentially complicated procedures and issues calmly. Confrontation or disagreements can happen, and the need to defuse these challenging situations is perhaps the most important use of strong communications skills in care.
We previously published an article talking about the importance of staff training in health and social care, but perhaps a more important discussion was had in an article about empowerment in health and social care. Written by my colleague Neoma Toersen, her article discusses the risks inherent from clients losing autonomy and feeling like they no longer have control. This is where effective communication comes in, and can help develop a rapport, build a connection, and allow proper discussion about the wants, wishes and needs of the person receiving care.
In this article we will assess communication in health and social care, with a particular focus on barriers of communication in health and social care and how we can overcome them – with special mention of our eLearning for care software. Our hope is that by reading this article you will have a better understanding of how to navigate not only the base level of conversation with patients or clients, but also the channels of communication and how to best go about engaging with people to make connections, gain insights, and ultimately improve their care.
What is communication in health and social care?
The Mental Capacity Act (MCA), Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) and Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS) are a crucial trio that ensure vulnerable individuals to receive appropriate care while respecting their autonomy. The landscape of care is guided by a framework of legislation to safeguard the rights and well-being of individuals who may lack the capacity to make decisions for themselves.
Fully understanding MCA, DoLS and LPS may be difficult for some. There is a lot of information out there and knowledge and practice are constantly changing. With over 30 years of experience working with thousands of care providers across the country, we at The Access Group know what you need to do to stay compliant while providing outstanding care.
With the help of our experts, we have put together this article that contains everything you need to know about MCA, DoLS and LPS that is easier to interpret and accomplish in your care service. For a more in depth view, you can take a look at our Guide to DoLS: What You Need to Know.
Care home occupancy is a key performance indicator for care homes. As you know, care homes are responsible for providing specialised care to the elderly and people with a wide range of personal care needs and/or medical conditions. The concept of care home occupancy revolves around the number of service users currently residing in a care home and utilising its services versus the overall available capacity of that care home.
Maintaining high occupancy rates is essential for care home providers. Unfilled beds represent lost income potential and with a growing ageing population in the UK, it also means that there are vulnerable people out there who aren’t having their needs met. With over 30 years of experience working with and digitising care services, we at The Access Group know how to help you optimise care home processes and have expertise in applying this to improve care home occupancy rates.
In this article, we will take a look into how to boost occupancy in care homes, the dynamics of care home occupancy, factors that influence it, strategies to increase occupancy and common mistakes to avoid.
The Care Inspectorate grades are used by the Care Inspectorate Scotland. The Care Inspectorate plays a vital role in ensuring the excellence of social care services across the country and they use their own set of guidelines and grading systems to do so. Using their comprehensive grading system, the regulator will evaluate various aspects of a care service and use their findings to rate them. As a result, valuable insights will be provided on the performance of services and the rating will influence their reputation.
With over 30 years of experience digitising care services across the world, we at The Access Group know what your care service needs to do to boost compliance and ensure that the highest quality of care is provided to service users. We’ve put together this article for Scottish service providers to elaborate on the grading criteria and offer tips on how to achieve better grades. We have also put together examples using the inspection reports available at Care Inspectorate Scotland.
Data protection in health and social care is concerned with safeguarding intimate details of vulnerable people. Health and social care providers have a duty of care to secure the personal data of the people they support and protect their dignity, well-being and safety.
Due to the sensitive nature of the information being handled, workers in health and social care must hold themselves to a higher standard than workers in other sectors. For example, the fact that someone with autism is scared of the colour green could be used to intimidate them if this information was leaked.
The health and social care sector faces many challenges to achieving cyber security. Digital literacy of staff across the sector is low, with workers having only a basic understanding of IT and a low awareness of data security issues. When allocating spending, providers prioritise improving the day-to-day welfare of people over enhancing their cyber security infrastructure.
In this article we will explore the current issues around cyber security and data protection in health and social care. We will break down what you need to know about the latest Data Protection Act in health and social care, then offer practical solutions that you can adopt to improve your data protection policies and procedures.
