Compliance Vs Quality: Start adding real value by driving continuous improvement

From working with a range of care organisations and services, we know that care teams work extremely hard day-to-day to try to provide efficient and effective care to their residents. However, do workers hyper-focus on ticking all the boxes, being compliant, and, therefore miss the opportunity to drive real change?  

Compliance vs Quality studies show that, for many companies, in and out of healthcare, compliance is seen as a more of regulatory tick-box exercise, rather than something that leads to improvement. Inspired by this and a recent conversation with our partner HC-One, we’ve been asking social care professionals, “what does quality and compliance mean to you?” Let’s take a look at the results.*

The C-word Vs the Q-word: The results  

The C-word (compliance) is a legal requirement, ensuring that certain standards are set and maintained throughout all operations within a business, protecting the safety of the organisation and its people. Whereas, the Q-word (quality), in its basic form, strives to produce better outcomes.  

Although the two have two different meanings and purposes, combined they can start to add real value to actions and begin driving continuous improvement, as well as many more workforce and customer benefits. With this theory in mind, we thought it would be interesting to put the two words head-to-head (Compliance Vs Quality) and see which one is seen as the most valuable to care teams.   

60% of people believe that quality drives improvement and is a standard to aspire to (32%). Nearly 10% of respondents see compliance as a routine tick-box activity, while 30% believe it is something that should or has the potential to add real value. Whereas, overall, 70% of social care professionals said that quality holds the most value, in comparison to compliance (12%).   

Should you be choosing a culture of quality over a culture of compliance?  

Radar Healthcare and HC-One are big advocates of not solely focusing on, as HC-One say, the C-word, a standard to meet, and placing quality at the center of everything we do – in order to, drive more value and encourage continuous improvement.  

Antony Hall, Director of Insights, Assurance, and Governance at HC-One, and our Chief Revenue Officer, Simon Qasir chatted at The Care Show 2022 about how to put residents at the heart of everything and why providing them with the best quality of life is their biggest focus. The key takeaways were that by fixating on compliance, something that is important but should be embedded within the work day and happening 24/7 regardless, you are at risk of never improving or learning. Whereas, by focusing on quality improvement and outcomes for residents you should automatically achieve compliance. 

Residents at the heart of everything – HC One’s Antony Hall and Simon Qasir, Radar Healthcare

The full conversation between Antony and Simon is available to watch here on our YouTube. Antony also spent 10 years working for the CQC and recently joined our Senior Marketing Manager, Justine Abson on  ‘What The HealthTech?’ to discuss how open communication and your CQC ratings can help to  to action change in your organisation, listen now here.  

Finding the balance: how can tech help? 

Arguably, technology is the future of healthcare. It is already helping so many organisations, whether that be ICSs, Private Care Groups, and Residential and Nursing Care Homes, to achieve better outcomes and grow digitally.  

Here at Radar Healthcare, we have designed a system and partnership that not only ticks all the compliance boxes, but encourages learning and collaboration, whilst driving continuous improvement all in one centralised system.  

“You can build a learning and improvement system to suit your need and drive real change and add value.”

– Antony Hall, Director of Insights, Assurance and Governance, HC-One 

Our risk, quality, compliance system and  offers a range of modules to accommodate the ever-growing needs of health and social care organisations and individual teams. Find everything from CQC-specific audits and integrated action and improvement plans to incident management, in-depth analytics, and more.  

Many of our care partners, like HC-One, use Radar Healthcare to learn, share, report, and spot trends to help to prevent risks at a local, regional, and organisational level across their care homes. This then allows their data to help to inform the right decisions needed which will ultimately improve the quality of life for residents in their homes.  

“Being able to use data analytics to give us a real-time view and get ahead of the curve when it comes to something that could become an issue in one of our care homes will be a real benefit to our organisation.”

– Antony Hall, Director of Insights, Assurance and Governance, HC-One 

We believe in helping our partners to make a real difference – and do so by embedding a culture of learning and open communication to not only drive better outcomes, and help our partners to increase regulatory inspection ratings, but to create an open work environment about continuous improvement and caring – while having residents at the heart of it all.  

“As with any care service, there will always be ways we can improve, but the measurement has to be seeing those improvements in real-time as we’re learning from the insights we can capture on the new system.”

– Antony Hall, Director of Insights, Assurance and Governance, HC-One 

To understand how you and your team can benefit from Radar Healthcare’s system, speak to our expert team today – book a consultation.   

*If you would like to get involved in this study or have any additional thoughts on what has been discussed today, please get in touch at marketing@radarhealthcare.com.  

Want to hear more? ‘A quality-focused approach: why this is the main driving force to making a real difference for residents in care homes’, featuring Antony Hall and Simon Qasir will be live on 26th January 2023. In the meantime, catch up on all things health and social care on What The HealthTech? 

Sneak peak of next week’s episode…

“I am an ex-regulator and was with the CQC for over 10 years so I understand the importance of compliance, but to me is just what has to happen, it should be the norm and happening 24/7… I have this belief that if you focus on quality and outcomes for residents you automatically achieve compliance, but I do honestly believe that if you just focus on compliance you don’t necessarily meet quality outcomes. And let’s be honest that is why the CQC brought in ratings in the first place, moving away from a compliance and non-compliance model, to a quality measure. Anything we do in our operational teams focuses on the Q-word, not the C-word because we expect compliance will automatically be there.”

– Antony Hall, Director of Insights, Assurance and Governance, HC-One