Care360 Team Care360 Team – My Care 360

Local authority assessments – implementing our new approach

Care360 Team Care360 Team — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 10:38:52 +0000

Completion of local authority pilot assessments

We are pleased to publish the findings of our 5 pilot assessments and want to thank each local authority for agreeing to take part.

Assessing how local authorities meet their duties under Part 1 of the Care Act (2014) is a new responsibility for CQC. During the pilots, we looked at 9 of our quality statements to assess how well each local authority is meeting its responsibilities. This enabled us to give an indicative rating.

Birmingham City Council – indicative rating of good
Lincolnshire County Council – indicative rating of good
North Lincolnshire Council – indicative rating of good
Nottingham City Council – indicative rating of requires improvement
Suffolk County Council – indicative rating of good

See our local authority assessment reports.

We found some similar themes across all 5 local authorities. These included:

Outcomes for people were better where there was good partnership working, including with voluntary and community partners as well as health partners.
Integrated working around discharging people from hospital was working and had improved the flow out of hospitals.
Staff tended to stay with a local authority when they felt valued, had learning and development opportunities, and where there was a positive culture.
There were different practices across the 5 local authorities in how they worked with young people who are transitioning from children’s services to adult services, so young people’s experiences were varied

Improving our approach

By carrying out the pilot assessments, we have identified areas that we need to improve to ensure our assessment approach is as efficient and effective as possible. These include:

Simplifying the information return – we use this to collect the evidence that we need to understand how a local authority is delivering its adult social care functions.
Reviewing our case tracking process to make this more efficient when looking at how individual people access and receive care through a local authority.
Further developing how we engage with the public through community and voluntary groups.

We will be implementing this learning into our formal assessments of all 153 local authorities with adult social care responsibilities. These will start from December 2023, pending government approval.

Starting local authority assessments

We will be writing to local authorities to notify them that they will be assessed. This notification will include a request for them to complete an information return and a date for our on-site interviews. The period between receiving notification of assessment to the on-site interviews will be approximately 9 to 11 weeks. We will be starting to issue the first notifications and information returns from early December.

We will take into consideration the following factors when planning the schedule of our assessments:

the different types, structures, location, and political make-up of local authorities
timing of our assessments of integrated care systems
practical factors that could affect our ability to carry out an assessment, for example transport and accommodation pressures due to major events in an area
other regulatory activity taking place at a local authority
existing knowledge of local authorities, for example prioritising local authorities where there is innovation or new models of care that ;we wish to understand more about, or where there are concerns that may require an earlier assessment
local and national pre-election restrictions.

We have updated our guidance on how we assess local authorities. We will publish this following government approval, as required by the Health and Care Act 2022. Until this is published, see our interim guidance for local authorities.

CQC reports on safe use of radiation in healthcare settings

Care360 Team Care360 Team — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 14:29:16 +0000

CQC’s annual report on our work to enforce the Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations in England has been published.

The regulations protect people from the dangers of being accidentally or unintentionally exposed to ionising radiation in a healthcare setting. Errors can happen when healthcare providers use ionising radiation to diagnose or treat people. Healthcare providers must notify CQC about these.

The report gives a breakdown of the number and type errors that CQC was notified about between 1 April 2022 and 31 March 2023. The report also presents the key findings from our inspection and enforcement activity in that time.

By sharing this information, we aim to help providers and healthcare professionals identify and take action where safety improvements may be needed in their own service.

In 2022/23, we received 727 notifications of errors:

380 (52%) were from diagnostic imaging departments
77 (11%) were from nuclear medicine departments
270 (37%) were from radiotherapy departments

During this period, there were over 43 million diagnostic imaging examinations carried out on NHS patients in England. Of these, around 29 million used ionising radiation. There were also 142,000 episodes of radiotherapy treatment in England.

This shows that notifications of errors represent a small proportion of the total examinations and treatment undertaken. Although notifications relate to incidents where there is risk of harm, most do not result in harm to patients.

The most common cause of error was when images were requested for the wrong patient. We also found that inadequate checks about the patient’s identity or mistakes by the operator had resulted in errors.

For some inspections, we made recommendations to providers to make improvements or took enforcement action in response to non-compliance with the regulations. Areas for improvement included:

Ensuring a full set of procedures and guidance that reflects effective clinical practice to support staff when delivering care.
More frequent testing of equipment.
Maintaining up to date and accurate records for practitioners working in the service.

The report identifies recurring themes and concerns found in our work and shares practical actions for IR(ME)R employers. These are suggested actions help to improve practice and ensure patient safety.

Further information

CQC is the enforcing authority for the Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations 2017 (IR(ME)R) in England.
Incidents can be reported on our website.

See further information about ionising radiation and how we enforce the regulations.

Implementation of Transforming Your CareHello world!

Care360 Team Care360 Team — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 19:35:58 +0000

The implementation of Transforming Your Care is being led by the Health and Social Care Board in collaboration with the Health and Social Care Trusts and other providers.

Work is progressing at a steady pace. Some of the key areas in which work is being taken forward include:

Integrated Care Partnerships – ICPs are bringing together health and social care providers from both the statutory and voluntary sector to help improve the patient journey, manage chronic illnesses and prevent unnecessary hospital admissions especially for our frail elderly and those with long term conditions.
Reablement – this service is for people who have suffered from a health or social care crisis, who are recovering from an illness or injury and have become frail as a result. Reablement helps people regain their independence and continue to live in their own homes. Work has been underway regionally to review this service so that it can be expanded and improved across Northern Ireland.
Health and Care Centres – construction is on-going on the development of three new centres in Banbridge, Ballymena and Omagh. A further two approved for Newry and Lisburn are currently in the procurement process.
Self Directed Support – this support increases the choice, flexibility and control that services users have over their social care budget and the services they receive. Progress has been made with positive engagement from all Trusts, and implementation plans and communications about further rollout of this important initiative are underway.

Regulatory Transformation

Care360 Team Care360 Team — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 14:29:32 +0000

Regulatory transformation – update September 2023

During any change journey, it is vital to listen and respond to feedback.

As we’ve been developing our new regulatory approach and planning for roll-out, we’ve invited our colleagues, providers and people who use services to share their views with us. We’re excited to share benefits with providers and support you with new ways of working.

Developing guidance in partnership

During the summer, we’ve heard from providers that they need more guidance before they feel ready to adopt new ways of working. We’re still developing our guidance and we’ll continue to involve providers in that development through our digital engagement platform, CitizenLab, as well as our webinar series and other engagement events over the coming months. Look out for opportunities in our regular email newsletters.

You’ve already helped us so much, and today we are publishing the next part of our guidance about the types of evidence we’ll look for as part of assessing each quality statement. We wanted to share this now, so you have time to read and understand it.

We will work with providers to help finalise the guidance on our new assessments before we roll it out. As we finalise this, we’ll share it with all providers to give them a reasonable period of notice before they are directly affected. Our current estimate for the majority of providers is around 8 weeks between publishing our final guidance and starting our new assessment approach.

Our intention is to go live with our new assessments with a small group of providers in the South network first, ahead of full roll-out. We’ll do that only when the necessary guidance is in place, but those first providers might have slightly less notice between when we publish the guidance and the live assessments. We will work closely with those providers to mitigate that shorter notice. We aim to share more information on our plans for this shortly, but expect the first of those live assessments to begin in mid-November.

Maintaining a view of quality

While we’re developing the remainder of our guidance with you, and until we can start assessing in the new way, we’ll continue with other contact, conversations and reviews.

We will also continue to inspect in response to risk and take action where appropriate.

Making progress

Our new provider portal, and improvements to how we process notifications, is now in final testing and will be available shortly. We’ll be rolling the portal out slowly, starting with a small group of providers, and carrying out some important testing before opening this up to others.

To stay up-to-date with progress, make sure you keep an eye out for our regular bulletins, webinars and supporting videos.

Finally, we want to assure you that we are not going to suddenly ask you to operate in a fundamentally different way. As you can see from the information on our website, the 5 key questions continue to underpin our work. We are seeking to reflect your feedback about the need for us to provide greater consistency, simpler processes, easier contact methods, more transparency, and the ability to change a rating more quickly when you improve.

South of England

The South refers to services registered in these counties: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire..

10 Tips for a successful healthcare business

Care360 Team Care360 Team — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 14:29:31 +0000

As people live longer, the number of patients with chronic and degenerative diseases increases, and, as a result, current medical infrastructure becomes progressively inadequate.

In the search for an answer to such a challenge, entrepreneurs have taken the bull by the horns and generated innovative, and in some cases revolutionary, solutions that range from digitizing clinical records to using artificial intelligence to perform remote surgeries.

However, like all emerging markets, there are a few nuances that need to be considered when starting a business in the health sector.

1. Understand the target market.

Because healthcare is a vast sector of the economy, identifying your target market is of extreme importance to a new company’s success. Otherwise, you run the risk of pursuing dead-end marketing strategies. It is also important to understand the business layers or the sequence of events that will entice your customers and keep them engaged with your product or service. In this manner, you will be able to focus on the potential of reaching the right audience and developing the most cost-effective strategies.

2. Form the right partnerships.

Healthcare is a delicate business. In one form or another, people’s lives will be directly affected by your decisions. You do not need to have a medical or scientific degree, but it’s almost essential to work with someone who does right from the start. By establishing the right partnership, you limit your financial risk and clinical liability. You also reduce the likelihood of making expensive mistakes.

3. Be passionate.

Be passionate, but do not confuse or mix passion with emotions. In the healthcare sector, this is easier said than done, and it might be difficult to distinguish the two. When you become emotional, your decision-making capacity is compromised, and it can affect your end results. Remember that success is the result of a long and challenging process, even more, when it’s to do with healthcare. Through this process, you must remain flexible enough to modify your business plan when needed. Through this process, you must be able to take criticism and see it for what it is: an opportunity to improve your product or service.

4. Understand the regulations.

Healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries on the planet especially with CQC. It is a complex, multisided ecosystem that is riddled with the possibility of making costly mistakes. Such mistakes aren’t just costly; they are also sometimes fatal, both from an end-user and a business perspective. It’s crucial for a healthcare entrepreneur to understand these and have a strong expert on the team to help if needed.

5. Be patient.

Starting a new healthcare business from the ground up is a complicated task, and it can take a long time before you reap the fruits of your labor. Understand that it takes considerable time to build products that meet the strict industry standards necessary to ensure a patient’s best interests. It takes time to test widely and thoroughly when dealing with a person’s health and well-being. It takes time before market adoption reaches past your initial expectations.

Healthcare businesses need time and commitment.

6. Allow room for mistakes but not costly ones.

In a sector as complex as healthcare, you must allow room for mistakes because mistakes will be made. However, it is essential to recognize the fact that mistakes represent an opportunity for learning and improving your product or services. Don’t focus so much on why mistakes were made. Instead, focus on how they will be fixed and prevented in the future. This approach will net your business the most favorable results and protect your end user and the business.

7. Stay lean.

Your ultimate goal as a healthcare entrepreneur is to maximize value for both you and your clients/patients. Establishing and maintaining a lean mentality will help you do just that. Learn to efficiently identify wasteful tasks and activities that provide no value to your enterprise and eliminate them promptly. This approach quickly reduces the burden on your team and improves the flow of your entire organization. Healthcare businesses demand a lot in terms of monetary investment. Therefore, staying lean isn’t just a good idea; it should be a priority.

8. Assemble the right team.

As in other sectors, the success of your new healthcare business will hinge on your ability to lead a large number of professionals. Everything from finance to marketing and operations to customer service must be effectively and efficiently managed. Build yourself a capable and robust support system, and your chances of achieving success will skyrocket straight out of the gate.

9. Be willing to pivot.

The business landscape changes often, and the healthcare sector more so than others due to the rapid pace of technological advances. That is a fact, and you have a fiscal obligation to recognize that fact and cultivate a willingness to adapt to the changing landscape. This ability to embrace change will significantly improve your chances of success. However, be careful not to overdo it. There is something to be said for sticking to your guns and persevering through difficult times.

10. Use the right application

The software used in running your business will make or mar its success. Care360 houses everything a provider need including support for success.

Whether you are considering investing in healthcare or running one keep these 10 tips in mind to remain successful in the ever-changing healthcare industry.