The CQC (Care Quality Commission) uses Key Lines of Enquiries (KLOEs) to inspect care homes and assess whether they are being met. Whilst you cannot be certain of when the CQC will come, you can be sure that they will come, and therefore you should always be inspection ready.

“There’s a difference between foraging for information and using the information. Radar Healthcare does both for you with just a click.”

– Walsingham Support

Our Inspection Ready Whenever They Are series has come to a close and the results are in. Let’s dive into what we found.

Be inspection ready with our CQC resources

As part of the campaign, we released five detailed guides on each of the five KLOE standards to help industry professionals better understand what the CQC expects and offer best practices.

You can find the full KLOE series on the news and blogs page of our website and below:

• The safe CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating
• The effective CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating
• The caring CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating
• The responsive CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating
• The well-led CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating

For further CQC-related information see our CQC hub.

Looking to improve safety outcomes? 

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Inspection Ready Whenever They Are: the results  

During our campaign, we surveyed health and social care professionals to find out how many are prepared for a sudden inspection*.

We asked questions based on topics that the CQC may ask, including locating documents, confidence in audits, relating actions to relevant KLOEs, and how happy people are in answering questions that the CQC might ask – and we were shocked with the findings!

Scan through the results we found:

We asked whether healthcare professionals are confident that their audits are up to date and 46.3% revealed that they are not. As you know, compliance audits should be a routine practice within healthcare organisations. Keeping them up to date is critical for the safety of residents and workers and a huge part of the CQC inspection.

Regular audits help services understand what has happened and why, what can be learned from what has happened, and what steps need to be taken to improve.

Luckily, advanced software like Radar Healthcare has pre-built and customisable auditing tools that can help organisations to be more organised and structured with audits, increasing the overall safety of the service and CQC ratings.

“Radar Healthcare has saved us 4 hours every month on clinical audits, with the added benefit of no admin help being required, meaning we can focus more time on providing care.”

– Spark Medical

Read full report

41.5% of surveyed professionals do not have a centralised incident log. From speaking to healthcare professionals, we found that many organisations and services work across multiple large documents and files when storing data – some going into the thousands. This can become unorganised and confusing for co-workers to collaborate and communicate with one another about shared information.

Having a system in place that centralises all this data is a strategic way of reducing human error and increasing visibility across a service. Radar Healthcare’s cloud-based incident and event management module offers just that, as well as allowing you to speak to other modules like action plans and audits, bridging that gap and increasing oversight of all processes, documents, and policies.

Over half (51.2%) of healthcare workers said that they do not have an action plan linking incidents and audits. The CQC are big advocates for promoting and seeing continuous improvement within an organisation. Having a structured and active action plan in place, that corresponds to the relevant audits, events, and incidents shows the examiner’s dedication to improving the service.

Radar Healthcare’s compliance software not only offers a central location for recording and monitoring all processes and policies but also encourages continuous improvement through our advanced action and improvement plan module.

“They were impressed with our systems. The CQC looks at audits, incidents, and complaints in a lot of detail, and having these items in a place where you can explain what happened, how it was resolved, what were the issues, and what were the learnings is invaluable.”

– Orri

Get access to the full results here:

Download report

How can Radar Healthcare help?

Overall, care organisations need revaluate their methods to ensure that they are constantly developing and evolving to maintain the best level of care and safety possible – and to feel better prepared for inspections, and therefore potentially achieve a higher rating.

Radar Healthcare’s quality and risk management software has been designed to help care services to improve their CQC ratings by supporting them to deliver safer and more effective care.

To better understand how our software helps our partners improve their CQC ratings, get in touch.

Disclaimer: *based on 41 surveys completed in June 2022.