Quality

Getting quality right

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skilful execution.” - William A. Foster

The quality of our services is at the heart of all that we do as an organisation. Getting it right can be challenging, but the quality team have a focus on making sure we are always learning and improving. This means making sure all our systems, policies, and information to support staff is clear, and linked to providing the very best support and services to supported people. We work in a joined-up way through our Quality Improvement and innovation group, so that we harness the efforts of colleagues in Learning and Development, Involvement, Communications, Digital, and leadership roles, to ensure our solutions are the best they can be.

As part of this effort to join up what we do across the organisation for the good of supported people and their staff, we embedded the quality officers into services so that they became part of the leadership and practice development efforts, working alongside staff, supported people and managers. This is also part of our strategy to improve our Care Inspectorate grades as well as making the services even better.

We continued to make sure our staff are skilled in key areas of support, working with the Learning development team on medication, to minimise errors and facilitating reviews with those they support etc. We have also updated key policies to make these clearer, as well as improving our Positive behaviour support plan to ensure it is easier to complete for the benefit of supported people and staff. Good starts have been reviewed for staff and leaders, and a new Good Starts Agency staff process developed to ensure we get it right for our Agency colleagues, so they can get it right for supported people. We also launched Quality Conversations for staff with a focus on wellbeing. And as always, we continued to learn from when our services didn’t get it right, and through feedback from supported people and carers etc.

When it is a struggle to just stay on track, making improvements can seem a bit unrealistic. But work has progressed across the teams. Some of the changes are evident in the results of the What Does Good Look Like audit compared to the previous year. Other times it is through new ways of working, in a team or across the organisation.

There is of course much work to be done and the challenges are still there- But if we can evidence one thing, it is that, together, we can make progress, even when it is tough out there. 

All the best,

Dale Goodfellow

Quality Manager