The best care is designed in partnership with the people who use it. People who use services should have the power and opportunity to shape their care. From designing the model of care to how care is delivered, this involvement should be genuine co-production and a partnership of equals.
Supporting your team to have the confidence and skills to work collaboratively is important. I am always impressed by teams that feel able to stand up and advocate for working in this way.
People often tell us how they feel valued by staff who show a genuine interest in their wellbeing and with whom they have a connection. It’s about asking people: What are your aspirations? Who would you like to live with? Respectful, friendly and meaningful conversations make people feel valued, so please keep taking the time to connect on a personal level with people in your care.
Being open to feedback, shaping training and services around people’s needs and making day-to-day interactions meaningful, are all aspects of open, positive cultures that we see in outstanding services.
These beliefs are also central to CQC’s engagement and co-production with people with lived experience, their families, providers and stakeholders. When we produce reports or consider a new way of working, we listen to many voices. It remains important to do everything we can to ensure people have care developed in partnership with them.
Because We All Care campaign
From 31st August, CQC’s public behaviour change campaign moved into a new phase: encouraging people who have chronic and long-term conditions, as well as their friends and family, to share feedback on care.
Because We All Care is run in partnership with Healthwatch England and aims to show how positive and negative feedback is valuable in understanding people’s experiences to inform the delivery of quality care.
We hope providers join the campaign to use free resources in the stakeholder toolkit, which includes an animation, imagery and graphics. We will publish research findings on our website, with insights from 1,000 people with a chronic illness and their carers, helping to shed a light on people’s experience of receiving support. The campaign also explores attitudes to providing feedback and the impact people believe this will have on care.
Commitment to people
We have reviewed and updated CQC registration guidance to strengthen our regulation of services for people with a learning disability and autistic people. If providers haven’t been assessed against Right Support, Right Care, Right Culture, they will not be able to provide specialist care for people with a learning disability and/or autistic people.
Upholding people’s dignity and showing respect to people using services whomever they are, whatever their needs, is the cornerstone of quality care. We are working on a report called Who I Am Matters, which I will keep you updated on in more detail. It centres on the experiences of people with learning disabilities and autism in acute hospitals. Sadly, people with learning disabilities die earlier than neurotypical people and often have poor experiences of accessing and using health services. I encourage you to watch out for this report and join us to raise awareness of the issues we uncover.
I am aware that many providers may be facing challenges around energy costs and staffing. We are committed to raising these issues and working with others to support the sector. If you are experiencing difficulties, speak to your trade association, local authority or us.
Debbie Ivanova is Director for People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People at the Care Quality Commission. Twitter: @CQCProf
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until care workers are valued, respected, trained and treated as professionals within the care industry in which there pay reflects this then there will continue to be a crisis within the care sector. Paid carers are expected to respect, care for individuals, with compassion sometimes in the most difficult of circumstances but do not receive the same care and respect back. In order to attract potential employees into care work then improved meaningful training, a SDP, career progression and decent wages need to be applied.