Our Standards
Our Quality and Staff Development Team monitor our standards of care. We have won regional and national awards for our work in this area.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspects us once a year. You can get a copy of the latest inspection report from us or the CQCs website at www.cqc.org.uk (see ‘find care services’).
Our local–authority commissioners also check the standards of our care.
We visit you regularly to check that we are meeting your needs. To do this, we carry out spot–checks, individual meetings, supervise your care, have team and peer–group meetings and assess how our staff perform. We constantly measure, review and update our standards.
Every year, we also send you a ‘user satisfaction survey’, and an independent assessor reviews the information and gives us a summary report.
Our practices are reviewed by Quality South East, to check that they meet the Investors in People (IiP) standards. You can get a copy of our most recent IiP Profile (advanced IiP) report from our head office. We are audited by Quality South East every year to maintain this standard.
We won the Sussex Business Awards 2003 as one of the best organisations for training and developing staff. We put forward a detailed statement of our staff training and development strategy to win the award, and we update this strategy every year using our workforce plan. We also work hard to develop our staff’s skills, and this won us the South East Business Awards for ‘Excellence in Skills and Development’ in 2008.
We also won a National Training Award in 2006. The judges were impressed by our ‘commitment to high–quality training for all employees and their clear vision linking learning to development’.
The highlights from our quality–standards projects have included the following.
Our programmes to develop and train our staff have helped to improve the quality of our services.
We have provided wide–ranging support for care support workers in the community, using our unique programme of shadowing, supervision, monitoring and mentoring.
We have a consistently high standard of service and this has helped us keep staff and provide even better services.
We have a management and supervision structure that is proven to help us manage a community–based service that puts you first.
This feedback we receive is not just from formal audit reports which analyse our service. We also receive positive feedback from:
- people who use our services and their families; representatives and carers,
- social workers;
- occupational therapists;
- community nurses; and
- colleagues in the health–care sector, including GPs’ practices and PCT staff.
