Providing service users with a “safe, effective, compassionate (and) high-quality care” while meeting national standards, is the goal of every care home or domiciliary care support service in the UK. In an industry as tightly regulated as the care sector, front-line staff must not only be able to understand complex legislation but implement a myriad of policies and procedures which frequently change.
In this challenging environment, where care professionals must absorb reams of complicated legislation, there’s a danger of information overload. Therefore, it’s crucial that care home managers are able to supply the right guidance to the right member of staff at the right time. And this is where technology can play a key role.
Of course, putting an information sharing strategy like this into practice is easy to say but much harder to implement. Several questions abound. For example, how do you ensure that you capture every single policy and procedure update? How do you cascade information down to care professionals? And how can you be sure, in a sector where many care professionals come from abroad, that new regulations are being correctly understood and applied at ground level?
But before you begin to even consider any of these questions, ask yourself this. How much content do you require for your staff to deliver great care and how long would it take for you to gather that content? While every care home is different, experts at Quality Compliance Systems (QCS), one of the UK’s largest content management providers, spend over 15,000 hours, producing 8,500 pages of content (at any one time) for the 4,000 service providers that use its technology.
In doing so, care home and domiciliary care agency managers using QCS’s Compliance Management System, can not only access 2,300 plus pages of guidance, but relay the right policy and procedure to care workers at the right time. They can send new guidance to staff the second it is enshrined in law via email or text message. And in care facilities in remote locations with limited bandwidth, updates can be communicated on paper.
QCS recognises that it’s not just about providing service users with clear and concise messaging, it’s also about making it easily digestible. To achieve this, QCS spent tens of thousands of hours re-thinking how content was presented, which was no easy task. The result is a system with thousands of pages of carefully-curated content – which seamlessly ties related content areas together so that care workers don’t have to carry out separate searches. In short, the QCS Compliance Management System enables care professionals, at any moment, to find exactly 
what they need for their job so they can carry it out safely and simply.
Accessibility is key too. Take training for instance. It can be received in many different languages and in many ways. For those who prefer the written word, but don’t have time to read an entire policy update, QCS has provided a summary of key points. For care professionals who favour the visual or audio learning techniques, there’s video-based help centre and regular webinars. And for care home managers, striving to inculcate a culture of quality assurance in their organisation, QCS, in partnership with several industry influencers, has developed a set of blogs around best practice. Finally, QCS’s Compliance Management System provides a full suite of options including audio translation features and a range of screen-reads aids.
You could of course take on the burden of managing policy and procedures yourself, but, on the other hand, If you want to find out more about how the QCS Compliance Management System could help, then please visit www.qcs.co.uk
