
While the single assessment framework from the CQC has taken a while to land, there is little doubt that it will become the means by which health and social care providers are assessed across England in the not too distant future.
As well as identifying the ways in which they will collect the data to inform their decision making, the CQC have released the quality statements which they will use to underpin their assessment of health and social care services. These quality statements are a replacement for the Key Lines of Enquiry and like the KLoEs are grouped with the five key questions, which in case you have forgotten are, is the service:
Safe
Effective
Caring
Responsive
Well-led
This means, that like the legislation underpinning the single assessment framework, which also is not changing services should still be able to recognise the bones upon which they are assessed.
Sadly, and despite many voices in the health and social care world being of the opinion they should drop it to a simple meets the standard / does not meet the standard, the Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate service rating system also stays in place.

That all said, the quality statements, https://www.cqc.org.uk/assessment/quality-statements are cause for some celebration because they articulate what health and social care should be about in a meaningful way which the KLoEs singularly failed to do.
Each quality statement is phrased to suggest that people in the caring service have adopted it as something they do. For example, they all start with the word "we" such that all staff should be able to recognise that the statements apply to what they do in the service.
The first quality statement under safe, https://www.cqc.org.uk/assessment/quality-statements/safe/learning-culture states:
We have a proactive and positive culture of safety based on openness and honesty, in which concerns about safety are listened to, safety events are investigated and reported thoroughly, and lessons are learned to continually identify and embed good practices.
In this way it identifies how services, and more importantly the people in them, need to adopt cultures which are safe and which are open and honest. It goes on to say what a culture like this looks like, "concerns about safety are listened to" and so on.
What is also important is that it identifies that lessons are learnt and good practices established. Such cultures, learning cultures are fundamental to safe and effective care and also to the ongoing development and wellbeing of staff.
A learning culture refers to the collective mindset within a service in which learning and quality improvement are at the heart of everything people do. A learning culture starts to grow where the service has the right policies, procedures, training, supervision and audit practices in place.
Leaders and leadership is fundamental to the development of learning cultures as they reinforce with the staff their shared values, the values of the organisation, the "we" statements. leaders in learning cultures celebrate the teams achievements and take responsibility when things go wrong. They, and their team, are not scared to try new things to improve what they do because they work in a learning and evolving culture, not one of blame.

If you need some help and guidance about establishing your proactive and positive culture of care, have a chat with Peter who will talk to you about the strategies which may work for your team.
For many teams, Emannah will only need to work with you for a short period of time to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and strategies for leadership and team development.
At Emannah, we take the view this is about us working together, rather than us telling you; that's one thing which makes us different.
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