Collaboration as the silver lining to COVID – a consultant’s view

We spoke to Michael Hinett, the owner of Qualis Solutions. He started off his healthcare career as a support worker, reached group director then decided to set up his own business. Qualis Solutions is a consultancy which advises health and social organisations in a range of ways, including showing them how digital technology can help.

Qualis use Radar Healthcare internally as a compliance tool for staff, but also to provide support for their clients particularly in compliance with CQC regulations. The main aspects that Qualis help their clients with are quality assurance visits, improvement plans, mentoring, business development, and tenders. Their clients are all different sizes of organisation with different needs but Qualis ensure they help improve quality of care the best they can. 

Are there any trends in the guidance that clients seek? 

One of the main reasons clients reach out to Qualis is for support evidencing quality and compliance ahead of CQC inspections. Some organisations take the right approach and actions when it comes to incidents and events, but they fail to write down what they’ve done and track it. This means that when it comes to a CQC visit and questions are asked, the evidence isn’t there so it looks like it hasn’t happened. 

When mentoring clients around CQC compliance and helping them prepare, Qualis advise them to lead the audit rather than let it happen. This shows confidence to the CQC inspector, and gives the health or social care organisation a great opportunity to fully explain what they’ve done and why. We also show them how having a system like Radar Healthcare makes this significantly easier, because you can digitally record evidence at the click of a button. 

How accepting are clients of moving to digital technology? 

Healthcare organisations hugely vary around their acceptance of digital tech. Some are more tech savvy than others, but it can be especially difficult for companies which are used to writing everything on paper. 

Qualis helps them to realise the huge amount of time savings technology like Radar Healthcare brings, as it removes the need for searching through folders and documents to find information you need. 

Could the CQC going digital be a huge change for some organisations? 

More and more healthcare is going digital, and during the pandemic the CQC has been requesting evidence digitally, meaning some organisations have had to scan large documents to send over. Getting Radar Healthcare saves you loads of time in the future if you invest time at the start to get it right for you. It’s also very customisable to your business unlike a lot of alternatives.  

How has COVID impacted health and social care? 

For years, social care has talked about providers being more collaborative between themselves, but instead they’ve seen each other as competition. The silver lining to COVID is that it’s broken this barrier down. 

Different providers are working together to share and learn, such as putting together COVID contingency plans. Providers in our area have a WhatsApp group for sharing the latest COVID guidance, and there are plenty of Facebook groups doing similar things. 

What impacts would you like to see continue after the pandemic? 

I think that providers should continue learning from each other in order to provide the best care possible, as that is everyone’s aim. The reason people start careers in healthcare is to help people, and it’s great we’ve seen so many examples of that this year. Sharing information and ways of doing things drives general improvements in care and therefore better experience and success for service users. 

If you’d like to find out more about Michael’s work at Qualis, take a look at their website here, or connect on LinkedIn. If you’d like to find out more about Radar Healthcare, check out our product or get in touch with our expert team.