Care is at the centre of the homecare industry, but with the pandemic affecting many homecare businesses, it’s more important than ever to understand how CQC guidelines can help you to create a culture of care in your business. Mike Williams, managing director, Tagtronics – a company developing innovative software to help homecare businesses improve care quality – reviews the CQC’s key lines of enquiry and explores how homecare businesses can use them to push care standards forward.

Meeting CQC standards

The past couple of years have been challenging for everyone, but particularly so for homecare businesses. Research shows that 56% of carers believe that the national lockdown negatively affected the dignity and independence of the service users they cared for. The CQC made 17 recommendations in 2020 to improve the care quality for those with complex needs. However, it recently stated that none of these recommendations had been achieved by 2022.

As the UK moves into the post-pandemic era, it’s important to think about how homecare businesses can continue to improve standards to create a culture of care that reflects CQC standards. 

Homecare businesses and carers may fear obtaining ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ ratings, but by understanding the key lines of enquiry, and implementing these standards all year round, CQC visits can become a learning opportunity of how to provide high-quality care efficiently. 

Understanding the key lines of enquiry

There are currently five key lines of enquiry that the CQC focus on whilst inspecting your business. These are:

1. Safe

All lines of enquiry are significant, but safeguarding your service users is the most important aspect. This should be incorporated into all of your business’ processes to protect your users, and you should be able to demonstrate how you learn from any errors made. For example, you may use eMARs to enhance service delivery and reduce medication errors. 

2. Effective

This line of enquiry examples outcomes of your support, care and treatment. The CQC wants to see how you deliver your care in conjunction with current legislation. It’s also looking to see that your business is committed to improving results for service users. Using a paperless system can automatically produce the reports you need for care regulators, which will help you to review how you’re improving results all year round.

3. Caring

The CQC wants to see that you and your carers are treating your service users with kindness, compassion, dignity and respect. You’ll need to prove how your business ensures this and respects privacy and independence. In comparison to traditional systems, a digital system can deliver much more transparency, giving you the insight you need to ensure a high quality of care. 

4. Responsive

This line of enquiry considers how you adapt your service to meet each individual’s needs, rather than providing the same type of care for all your service users. For example, digital care plans can support your carers by ensuring the unique needs of an individual are met. 

5. Well-led

The final line of enquiry requires a vision and strategy for your business. They should help your carers to provide a high quality of care to your service users, encourage a positive work culture and prove how you all learn, improve and innovate. 

Embodying a culture of care

To ensure the above lines of enquiry are implemented into your business by your next visit, start by assessing where you currently are. 

A ‘good’ rating obtained during your last inspection means you shouldn’t be inspected for the next 30 months. However, this doesn’t mean you should sit back, as a culture of care revolves around the continuous improvement of care standards.

Try assessing your last report and review the areas you could improve on – this could progress your rating from ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’. If you are unsure of where to start, compare your business to local and national averages, for example, looking at customer satisfaction, staff turnover or staff qualifications. 

You don’t need to wait until your next CQC visit to evaluate your quality of care. When using a digital system, you can easily gather data on care plans, your workforce, complaints and incidents to identify and determine a problem before it is flagged up by the CQC.

Also, remember to evidence your improvements between inspections as you go along to ensure your hard work is acknowledged.

The difference

Embedding a culture of care is about investing much more than just money. By understanding and consistently aiming for the CQC’s key lines of enquiry, rather than just before inspections, you can improve your service users’ and carer’s experience. In turn, this will boost your business’ growth, team retention and overall quality of care.