If you’re facing tightening budgets and an increased demand for efficiency, understanding the specifics of how your care service runs is essential. If you’re facing the scrutiny of a CQC inspection, understanding and being able to portray how your care service runs is also essential. Modern systems play a fundamental role in supporting care services to achieve these aims. From acting as a central database to helping software users collate and interrogate the data they need, having the right care management software in place can make reporting and your CQC inspection that much easier.

We’ll get into that in a bit more detail shortly, but visit us at the Care Show on stand H65 to find out more about how our Certa software can help you.

Displaying accurate data depends upon accurate data capture. By giving prominence to data within your care service, you can help to ensure its smooth transition from the point of recording through to displaying it in reporting dashboards across your organisation.

Understand your care services

With robust and bespoke reporting mechanisms in place, you can truly get under the bonnet of your care services. What is working well? What could be improved? Where can efficiencies be found?

Only with the right software supporting you can you answer those questions.

Okay, so what do I need to be looking at?

Having bespoke reporting tools helps you understand your business, making every area of it transparent to you and, therefore, inspectors. Your system needs to support you in:

• Operational management: Future staff usage, unplanned visit analysis, missed visits, real-time care worker analysis, my tasks (what the user has to complete) and staff compliance (e.g. key accreditations and where they might be expiring).
• Client management: A full overview of each client’s timeline, covering previous and planned visits, actions taken and billing.
• Financial management: Full timesheet reporting with an audit trail of authorisations for timely and accurate billing and pay.
• System administration: A complete audit of system users and admin trails.
• Senior management: Profitability reporting and business insights.
• Client portal: Planned and delivered care with the ability for clients, their friends and family and to see what has happened and what is planned for future visits.

How does this help with CQC inspections?

The CQC, at the point of inspection of your services, will ask five key questions in line with its single assessment framework (SAF). Is you service safe? Effective? Caring? Responsive to people’s needs? Well led?

Whilst parts of the assessment comprise speaking with your staff, opening up your service to inspectors greatly assists in transparently laying out how you work. From here, you can evidence that visits are being conducted by trained, compliant staff in a timely manner, that you consider and respond to the needs of your clients and that you provide the best possible environment in which your carers can succeed in delivering services.

This demonstrates that you’re safe, effective, responsive and well led. To help you with this, we’ve put together a comprehensive CQC inspection checklist, which you can get for free here.

Conclusion

With the aim of your service doubtless being outstanding care delivery to your clients, being able to easily monitor this constantly helps to keep your services on track all the time. Not just when the inspector comes calling.

Making reporting and analysis part of your business process makes your services constantly transparent. This makes it easier to identify patterns in your business, understanding what’s working well and what could be improved.

Why not download our free inspection checklist now? It’s designed to support you in being transparent in what you already do: providing outstanding care to your clients.

About Certa

Certa from CACI is an all-in-one care management platform built for adult social care providers. From care planning and rostering through to eMAR, compliance reporting, a mobile app for carers and a family portal, it brings the day-to-day running of a service into one place.

As the CQC's expectations continue to evolve, CACI is also investing in AI-powered features designed to reduce admin and surface the right information at the right time. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, come and find us at stand H65.

Have any questions or want to learn more about how Certa can support your service? Get in touch with our team at certa.enquiries@caci.co.uk.