By Edith Macintosh, Interim Executive Director of Strategy and Improvement and Marie Paterson, Chief Inspector - Adult Services
New ways of inspecting care homes for adults will start on 20 May 2019, reflecting Scotland’s Health and Social Care Standards which focus on people’s human rights, wellbeing and personal experiences of care.
There are different types of care homes for adults. We have brought them all into one framework for care homes for people with:
- learning disabilities
- mental health and
- physical and sensory impairments, blood borne viruses and addictions.
The new framework is for self-evaluation, inspection and to support improvement and is adapted from an approach widely used in quality management. It uses a series of key questions to try to understand the impact care has on people.
The key questions are:
- How well do we support people’s wellbeing?
- How good is our leadership?
- How good is our staff team?
- How good is our setting?
- How well is our care and support planned?
Each of the key questions has a number of quality indicators associated with it, and each key question has two illustrations to show what a care home might look like at different levels of quality.
Inspectors will look at a range of quality indicators on an inspection, and use the illustrations to help them evaluate quality on the six-point scale of unsatisfactory, weak, adequate, good, very good and excellent. Inspectors will provide an overall evaluation for the key questions that they inspect, and also detailed evaluations for each of the quality indicators. The precise key questions and quality indicators that inspectors look at will depend on the specific care service, but we will always look at people’s wellbeing, how care is planned and the outcomes people experience.
We have consulted and engaged widely over the last year with people who experience, provide and commission care to ensure any changes are informed and well understood. This builds on the very extensive consultation during the development of the care standards themselves. With the standards being relevant across all health and social care settings, and in commissioning, planning and assessment too, the consultations were helpful in discussing how the standards could be ‘made real’ in care homes for adults.
We also tested it the framework in around 20 services, across a range of types and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. People thought that the framework was easy to understand, that it supported the Health and Social Care Standards and was useful for self-evaluation and in supporting improvement.
The new inspections will not be unfamiliar to people who have experienced recent inspections, but there will be a growing emphasis on evaluating the impact of care and support on people’s experiences and outcomes. We will also be focusing heavily on the importance of assessment, care planning and reviews as we know this is fundamental in understanding people’s choices, needs and wishes – and in helping to meet them.
We are also working with people experiencing and providing care to develop similar frameworks for other settings. We want to involve lots of people in that, and will test new approaches before deploying them in different settings.
You can keep up to date with the changes and find more details about them on our Inspections page on the website.