How to make a care home outstanding
How to make a care home outstanding – why you should care
If your first question is what do the CQC do? They are the Care Quality Commission, the regulator of health and care services in England.
The CQC award overall ratings to care homes, ranging from Outstanding (being the very best), followed by ‘Good;, ‘Requires Improvement’ and lastly ‘Inadequate’.
An Outstanding rating is coveted by all care home operators and understandably so. Only 3.5% of care homes are ‘outstanding’. Having an outstanding rating can boost your ability to attract more residents, either from loved ones or council commissioners feeling more confident in your abilities.
It can also give you positive PR, which in turn can boost intake of residents. You will see many care homes being featured in local press and trade media when they receive an outstanding rating. Any press a care home gets when it is rated inadequate is unlikely to have been sought or welcomed by the care home itself!
Finally, an outstanding rating can boost staff morale and confidence, on a day-to-day basis and when the next inspection comes around. It can even boost recruitment and certainly boost the confidence and profile of the care home’s registered manager.
How to make a care home outstanding
This is our take on what makes a care home outstanding:
- An outstanding care home manager who is supported, confident and valued in their role
- They have sufficient resources in order to do the job well, investing these resources into the services provided
- Values within the care home are clear and effectively translated to all staff, ensuring each member of the team is aligned
- Are well organised
- Deliver person-centred care
- Outstanding care homes can evidence strong performance and where they have identified issues or concerns and the actions they are taking to address them
- Carry out mock inspections and other items on our CQC inspection checklist
In addition to the points above, to make a care home outstanding you should understand how the CQC inspects and rates care homes. Firstly, outstanding care homes will meet the CQC’s 5 Standards:
- Are they safe?
- Are they effective?
Are they caring? - Are they responsive to people’s needs?
- Are they well-led?
These are not very descriptive however, and to get a real idea of how the CQC determines a care home is outstanding, you should also get to grips with the CQC Key Lines of Enquiry and the CQC Fundamental Standards too.
Understanding how the frameworks and criteria used to assess and award ratings to care homes will enable you to more effectively meet that criteria and provide robust evidence for it.
Smaller groups have more outstanding care homes?
It’s been found that the smaller care providers, who have portfolios of just 1-2 care homes, tend to be the ones who achieve outstanding. Whilst the larger providers have a greater pool of resources, they continue to struggle to achieve consistency. It’s likely that a larger care provider will have an outstanding care home, but it’s common that you will also find a home rated inadequate, or at least requiring improvement within the same provider.
The right registered managers can make a care home outstanding
Research has found that one of the primary reasons care homes succeed is because they are managed by a manager who consistently performs in their role, driving the care home forward.
However, a Skills for Care report on registered managers found that 1 in 4 care homes lose their manager per year, with 1 in 3 leaving in nursing homes. Yet, one of the main fundamentals for excellence in a care home is good management.
Recruiting a registered manager who feels confident and competent in their role is likely to lead to an outstanding care home, where residents are treated with dignity and respect. However, when a manager feels unsupported and undervalued, this is when they are likely to move on, because they aren’t getting what they need to be able to manage their home well, to deliver the high quality, person-centred care that their residents need.
Values and ethos help make a care home outstanding
What is of great importance in a care home is establishing your home’s values and ethos, to ensure that every single member of your team represents these every day.
Each and every team member must share the same vision, where profit is not what drives your business forward, but putting the needs of each individual resident first, valuing each person you are there for, no matter their status or role.
Sufficient resources are needed to make a care home outstanding
A strong pool of resources are essential to any care home. This allows the registered manager to invest these into the service, to provide the best quality care possible. With a strong pool of resources, the registered manager will feel supported meaning they will feel more valued, and confident and competent in their role.
As we get older, we all hope that if we end up in a care home or nursing home that we receive outstanding care. Therefore, it’s important that registered managers are supported and made to feel valued.
Remember, a confident and competent registered manager is one of the fundamentals that underpins high-quality care in a home. Therefore, why are their jobs made more difficult by a lack of resources? As we discussed earlier, having a strong pool of resources will make the role of a registered manager easier, giving them the ability to manage their responsibilities better.
Lastly, establishing your home’s values and ethos is essential in order to deliver person-centred care, tailoring the support you give to every individual’s needs. When you compile these three elements together, you have the fundamentals in place to achieve an outstanding rating from the CQC. Now, what’s your plan of action?!
Care homes with outstanding CQC reports
If you really want to get into the weeds you can review care homes with outstanding CQC reports. You can go to the CQC website directly and using their search function, filter by service type (care homes) and by Overall Rating (outstanding).
However, in our opinion this is not essential to make a care home outstanding. You are much better off spending your time following the points above:
- Understanding how the CQC inspect care homes
- Doing mock inspections of your own service
- Use our CQC inspection checklist.
- Invest in your staff, especially your registered manager
- Instil your values throughout each and every care home, for example, values of person-centred care
Focus on providing the highest standards of care possible, make that your mission and an outstanding rating is on the cards for your care home. Tools like Access Care Compliance, with its mock inspection wizards and action plans can help you drive up standards, match and meet the CQC’s criteria.
Meanwhile electronic care plan systems can improve safety, efficiency and evidencing. eLearning for social care can also ensure people have the right skills to provide high quality care and help retain your best staff including your registered manager which as we’ve discussed can be crucial to make a care home outstanding.
So, the right tools will definitively help, but you will still need those core values, leadership and ambition to deliver the best care possible for your residents, to make your care home outstanding in the eyes of the CQC.
What do you need to do before your next CQC inspection? View our CQC checklist.
