Maintaining standards, high quality training and providing high quality care is the only way to stay in business. The Care Quality Commission will take action against offending companies. In its annual State of Health Care and Adult Social Care in England 2014/15, the CQC pointed out that over the year it had taken 1,179 enforcement actions. This included 63 non-urgent cancellations of registration and 27 urgent suspensions – thus ensuring that the provider could no longer run the service.
Nursing homes provided a lower quality of service, with one in ten of those inspected being rated inadequate. Poor management and leadership was a common problem throughout all forms of care provision. Many managers provided insufficient staff training, there was a lack of systems and processes and poor engagement with staff and users.
The CQC observed that some providers were definitely struggling to provide high quality service levels. It stated that most providers needed to undertake improvements in their practice and business. Key areas for improvement were safety, working collaboratively to address cross sector issues and encouraging staff to take ownership of quality and safety issues.
The report pointed out that 10% of adult social care services were totally inadequate in terms of safety. This included staff numbers, staff training, lack of knowledge about risk management, the reporting of risks and equipment checks. Medicines were often poorly administered and the safety of the living environment was not being maintained. The safety situation was exacerbated by the presence of a blame culture and general weakness in follow up training after accidents and incidents.
Effective staff development and training along with strong management would clearly make a lot of difference. As a CQC inspector commented in the report, ‘leadership is the main steer, if there is a good manager in place who knows the service, is passionate about the service, then if they get that right, the rest of it’s going to right. The vision goes throughout the service.’
Getting it wrong will be costly for all concerned.