Ultra Healthcare Solutions continues to champion auditing in care services

By Elizabeth Ndhlovu-Dumbreni

Auditing has often been described as one of the most frightening and difficult tasks within the health and care industry, prompting many to seek the services of well-established companies. Here, Ultra Healthcare Solutions takes you through the process and simplifies the task for you, in a way that will ensure you realise your set goals. First, we have to establish what auditing is and what it entails.

What is Auditing?

Simply put, auditing revolves around the review of how effective the healthcare practice is, in line with the set out high-quality care standards. This, in turn, helps improve the quality of care offered by the service provider. At Ultra Healthcare Solutions, we have worked with quite a number of service providers in the UK, among which include Procare Healthcare, Affinity Care and Plus Point Care; and we have guided them through the process of auditing and finally Care Quality Commissions (CQC) registration, so that they become better at what they do.

Service Providers Speak

Because auditing measures current practice against a defined set of standards, many service providers have chosen to continue working with Ultra Healthcare Solutions and expressed their happiness

The Inspection Approach

To carry out any pre-inspection self-audit, it is important first to understand the regulatory framework against which the CQC inspectors assess compliance. These inspectors will use The Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) as tools for assessing compliance with the corresponding regulations and to award a quality rating. The rating given represents the extent to which the service has complied with the legal requirements. They will also use these prompts to assess how the service is involving people in assessing needs and planning their care.

These are the areas that we will look at when we walk you through the process because when you finally go through the same process with CQC, they will assess and rate your service. Their inspection reports include ratings. These can help you to compare services and make choices about care. Below are the four ratings that CQC will give to health and social care services:

• Outstanding– Means the service is performing exceptionally well.
• Good– The service is performing well and meeting our expectations.
• Requires improvement – The service is not performing as well as it should and we have told the service how it must improve.
• Inadequate– The service is performing badly and we’ve taken action against the person or organisation that runs it.

Why Is Auditing Important?

The care audit quality cycle highlights how services you provide meet evidence-based standards, highlights how services might be improved, and ensures, through robust action-planning and further audit, that you implement the changes needed to improve care and outcomes for people who use your services, says hquip.org.uk. They also explain that care audit identifies unmet needs and unacceptable variation in care, drives quality improvement and efficiency, and showcases excellence.

Auditing serves as a way of finding out if a care service is being provided in agreement with the set-out standards and it also allows care providers and service users to know whether the service is doing well or not. It also provides recommendations for future improvements. The aim is to allow quality improvement to take place where it will be most helpful and beneficial to and will improve outcomes for the users.

It is always important that you carry out an internal audit process in line with the CQC requirements. The key questions to focus on are safety, effectiveness, care, responsiveness and being well-led. This is what Ultra Healthcare Solutions will look at as we prepare you for the final QCQ audit. Our aim is to help you build on your existing successes, and give you an insight into the quality of service that you provide, and offer solutions on how best you can improve on it.

The Care Audit Quality Cycle

The care audit quality cycle, hqip.org.uk says, highlights how services you provide meet evidence-based standards, how services might be improved, and ensures, through robust action-planning and further audit, that you implement the changes needed to improve care and outcomes for people who use your services. The diagram below will help you better understand how the cycle is beneficial to an audit plan.