CQC Compliance Quality Assurance
Care & Client Management

What is it?

Quality Assurance is a set of processes by which an organisation ensures that it carries out its functions to an agreed standard, which is acceptable to its customers. It is not quality checking/audit. That is a lesser process.

What does it do?

Quality Assurance requires that an organisation fully specify what it is going to do for a customer, then design all of the processes which will deliver that outcome, then carry them out, then check that they were carried out to the agreed standard, then rectify the process if they were not done to standard. This is often called the "Plan-Do-Check-Act" cycle.

It is not satisfactory to simply check that the customer is satisfied (e.g. by audit or questionnaire) because if the rest of the defined process does not exist, no one will know what to go back and change if a problem is found.

How does the QCS Care Management System fit it?

The QCS Care Management System is what is technically called a Total Quality Management System. Every part of it i.e. every policy, forms part of a matrix of processes which are designed overall to achieve an outcome that the customer wants.

In terms of the customers as defined as the care receiver, the key processes in this are the Recruitment process and the Care Planning process.

The recruitment process is intended to ensure that the right staff are employed, and they are properly qualified and trained.

The care planning process is intended to ensure that the right staff are given the right information about what each individual care receiver needs, and is told how to deliver what they need.

Both of these processes feature very heavily in the QCS Care Management System. The rest of the QCS Care Management System is aimed at satisfying other "customers", such as the registration authority, health and safety regulators etc, in a way that supports and does not conflict with the main task i.e. the giving of care to the individual standard required by the care receiver.