The responsive CQC standard and how to achieve an improved rating
30 May 2022
Tags:
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) uses five main Key Lines of Enquiries (KLOEs) to assess the quality of a service delivered by a healthcare organisation. From this assessment, they are awarded a rating. One of the questions the CQC assessor will ask is: “is your care responsive?”
The CQC measures responsive care based on how an organisation strives to meet people’s individual needs. However, a prevalent challenge that healthcare organisations face is meeting the requirements for responsive care.
This blog acts as a useful resource to help healthcare services gain a better understanding of the responsive CQC KLOE, the requirements, common roadblocks, and how technology, like Radar Healthcare, can support services to deliver responsive care and achieve an improved CQC rating. 
How does the CQC define the responsive standard?
“By responsive, we mean that services meet people’s needs.”
Requirements for services
Healthcare organisations should already be trying to build a culture of responsive care throughout their service, personalising their care to individual people’s needs, considering and welcoming feedback where applicable, and consciously adjusting to improve their service.
Let us look at the four different requirements that healthcare services are expected to adhere to when it comes to the responsive CQC:
R1) Services are expected to provide personalised care that is responsive to individuals’ needs. This should reflect the needs of the people served and ensure flexibility, choice, and continuity of care. Where this is not met organisations need to show how they are striving to improve and develop.
R2) Healthcare organisations have a responsibility to prioritise the needs and choices of diverse groups of people. The CQC inspects how services consider equality, accessibility, and social and cultural requirements when delivering care.
R3) People should be able to access their care and treatment at a time to suit them, this includes access to initial assessments, test results, diagnosis, and/or treatments. Organisations will also be assessed on how well technology is used to support timely access to care and treatment.
R4) Are people’s concerns and complaints listened to, responded to, and used to improve the quality of care? The CQC is interested in seeing how encouraging services are in receiving feedback and actioning plans off the back of these comments to improve the service offered.
Challenges healthcare organisations may face
A lack of communication between all parties
The responsive CQC encourages services to adhere to flexible accessibility of records, care, and treatment to all of those affected. It also states that people in care are consulted about their care plans and given the opportunities to make choices (if appropriate). However, in the busy schedule of a healthcare professional, communication with all the relevant parties can be overlooked.
Limited information and support
To be able to deliver a high quality of responsive care, healthcare professionals must be knowledgeable of the preferences, background, and needs of the person that they are caring for. Close to half (42.9%) of people in our CQC checklist survey said that they are unconfident that their staff training records were up to date. Due to several reasons ensuring that staff is supported with the right resources and information can be difficult at times, nevertheless, this can cause many issues, including reducing the quality of care delivered.
Concerns and feedback are not actively collected and managed
Our CQC checklist survey revealed that 50% of healthcare organisations do not collect and record concerns and feedback. If services are not recording and acting upon concerns, then they will not be addressed or resolved, and, therefore, the service will be penalized.
How does Radar Healthcare support the responsive CQC?
Collects and records feedback
Collecting feedback from people is essential for development. Radar Healthcare offers a solution that not only collects events, incidents, complaints, and concerns but promotes a healthy work culture through reporting and evidencing compliments as well. This allows healthcare professionals an opportunity to reflect on and recognise the positive impact that their service is having, as well as work towards the responsive CQC.
We now demonstrate positive outcomes, so we can use that as evidence to the CQC. If we encourage staff posting positive events as well as incidents on Radar Healthcare, we are going to be able to present these great experiences in our homes to our investors, the CQC and other regulators.
Action and improvement plans
CQC assessors want to see services actively evidencing and actioning steps to make improvements based on the feedback received, to show that they are striving for continuous improvement.
Shockingly, 57.1% answered said that they do not have an action plan in place which links to the corresponding Key Line of Enquiry (KLOE) in our CQC checklist survey. In the same study, 71.4% answered no to being able to identify actions that relate to each KLOE.
Luckily, Radar Healthcare embeds a culture of continuous improvement throughout our modules – allowing our clients to link action and improvement plans to each of their audits, risk assessments, and incidents and events.
The number of incidents reported increased from an average of 4 per month to 35 with the introduction of Radar Healthcare - meaning the CQC can see we’re accurately reporting and actioning incidents to drive continuous improvement.
Find out if you are CQC ready with our interactive checklist!
More in our latest blog series about CQC's KLOEs
