The Care Quality Commission (CQC) will inspect health and care organisations at least once every five years – sooner if previous inspection resulted in an ‘inadequate’ or ‘requiring improvement” rating.
These ratings are significant given that they form the basis upon which individuals compare services and make choices about their care. Therefore, it’s important that when an inspection is due, that you’re fully prepped and ready to ensure you pass with flying colours.
In this post, we’ll detail a few ways that a robust workforce management software can help you prepare for inspection.
Training and compliance
The CQC expects that all staff within your organisation will be suitably qualified, competent, and experienced to adhere to the Health and Social Care Act 2008 – ultimately meaning they’re able to safely meet the needs of patients. Failure to comply with this could result in CQC registration being refused.
How to prepare:
RotaMaster stores compliance and training information for your workforce, even prompting reminders for expiry / renewals to ensure that compliance is kept up to date – and crucially that each shift is staffed by qualified, competent, and experienced staff.
It’s all auditable too – so you can easily share this information with the CQC.
Safe staffing
It’s important for your healthcare organisation to be able to demonstrate that you are always operating safe staffing levels. Whilst this can be difficult, especially with the current recruitment and retention challenges faced by the sector – it’s possible to mitigate this as best possible with a robust workforce management software.
How to prepare:
Auto-scheduling within RotaMaster gives healthcare organisations the ability to automatically assign staff to shifts at the click of a button. Simply create your shift pattern with any special requirements and the software will populate your rota to accommodate either; maximum fill rates and / or prioritise business critical shifts first.
Further to this, RotaMaster gathers all time and attendance data on shifts worked and feeds this into your payroll calculations. Again, as with training and compliance documentation, this is all auditable and allows you to demonstrate best practice to the CQC.
Reporting
Identifying areas for improvement prior to inspection will allow you to take appropriate steps to correct any issues with time to spare. Whether it’s gaps in training, shortfalls in compliance or recurrent absence issues, these can all be addressed early with a workforce management software.
How to prepare:
RotaMaster includes over 250 customisable reports which give you complete oversight of operations at your healthcare organisation. Enabling you to highlight trends and pinpoint areas for improvement, long before they might hinder operations.
Whilst many of these reports offer preventative protection, they can also be shared with the CQC to demonstrate compliance and exemplar operations.
Conclusion
Preparation for CQC inspection should start long before the minimum two-weeks’ notice is given. But the workload and worry shouldn’t ever get in the way of providing an excellent service. That’s why a great workforce management software, yes, like RotaMaster, can help you get ahead of the curve and ensure that you’re in a place to put your best foot forward when the inspectors come to visit.
If you’d like to find out more about our software, get in touch today.
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