The caring CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) uses five main Key Lines of Enquiries (KLOEs) to assess the quality of service delivered by healthcare organisations. From this inspection, they are awarded a rating.

One of the questions asked is: “is your service caring?”

The term caring carries a range of meanings. The CQC measures care based on how an organisation treats and cares for its patients, clients, or residents. This includes ensuring that they are provided with support both emotionally and physically, as well as actively showing that an organisation considers and values its clients, residents, and/or patients’ voice at all times.

One of the challenges organisations faces is consistently maintaining high standards of care. This blog acts as a guide to help healthcare services gain a better understanding of what is meant by the caring CQC KLOE, the service requirements, challenges faced, and how advanced technology can help healthcare services achieve an improved rating.

What is meant by the caring CQC?

The CQC defines the caring KLOE as:

“By caring, we mean that the service involves and treats people with compassion, kindness, dignity, and respect.”

Requirements for healthcare services

Healthcare organisations should have a culture of caring embedded throughout their service, workers should show kindness and respect to all people around them – including residents, visitors, family, and co-workers. In this section we will look at the three different requirements that healthcare services are expected to adhere to when it comes to the caring CQC:

C1) Organisations must treat everyone with kindness, respect, and compassion. They are expected to be able to evidence that they are supporting residents and employees emotionally as well as physically. This includes being able to understand and be sensitive to personal, cultural, social, and religious needs.

C2) Clear and open communication between carers and clients is essential. All services must ensure that they are encouraging people to express their opinions and be actively involved in decisions associated with their care, treatment, and additional support. The relevant information must also be made accessible to clients and those closest to them upon request.

C3) Services are required to respect and preserve people’s privacy and dignity and be able to routinely evidence this. The CQC will question how employees and their services enforce that people’s privacy and dignity needs are understood and met, this includes during examinations, consultations, treatment, and so on.

Obstacles that organisations may face when trying to deliver caring care

Lack of information and support

To be able to deliver an elevated level of care, carers must be fully equipped with all the right information and resources about the individuals that they are caring for. However, a lot of the time, due to a lack of support, training, management, and/or workforce, these things can be overlooked.

Workers are extremely busy juggling commitments and duties and, therefore, can struggle to find time and the right support to understand preferences, histories, and personal details about the individuals that they are caring for which reduces the quality of care provided.

Complaints are not heard or collected  

The caring CQC encourages services and workers to listen to people. Care organisations may receive feedback from clients, relatives, or others that encounter the service, such as other healthcare professionals, but if they are not recorded and acted upon then the service will never progress, and the concerns will not be resolved.

Lack of evidence

Similarly, carers could be showing kindness and compassion towards their residents and workers, but if it is not being recognised, reported, or supported by the organisation there’s a lack of evidence to support the caring CQC.

In addition, our CQC checklist revealed, that 71.4% of healthcare workers were not confident that audits were up to date and evidenced correctly.

How does Radar Healthcare support the caring CQC?

Radar Healthcare’s software supports healthcare organisations through a range of quality and compliance modules, to deliver caring care, support them to prepare for CQC inspections, and provides sufficient evidence to achieve a good or outstanding rating.

Saves time

In a recent study, 80% of care home residents declared that if they could spend more time with their carers they would be somewhat happier. Radar Healthcare has been designed to reduce the amount of time spent on admin and help workers manage and organise their tasks and data, allowing them more time to spend with and caring for their patients and residents.

Our software consolidates data to drive business improvements. Find everything from risk management and audit management to analytics and business compliance all in one customisable system.

Provides a safe and secure space to collect all types of events and feedback

Collecting feedback from people is crucial for an organisation to learn and grow. Radar Healthcare offers a solution that not only collects events, incidents, complaints, and concerns but promotes a healthy and positive work culture through reporting and evidencing compliments as well. This allows workers to reflect on and recognise the positive impact that their service is having, as well as showing the inspectors that as an organisation you are supporting all parties.

Interconnectable with our event and incident management module, we have action and improvement plans that allow organisations to show that they are actively working on continuous improvement.

Find out if you are CQC ready with our interactive checklist!