Care teams work extremely hard day-to-day to try to provide efficient and effective care to their residents. But are workers hyper-focused on ticking all the boxes, being compliant, and, therefore missing 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, the experts at Radar Healthcare have asked social care professionals, “What do quality and compliance mean to you?”
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, the team at Radar Healthcare have put the two words head-to-head (compliance vs quality) and revealed which one is seen as the most valuable to care teams.
60% of those surveyed 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 centre 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 Radar Healthcare’s 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.
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.
Radar Healthcare, 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,” said Hall.
The risk, quality, and compliance system offers a range of modules to accommodate the ever-growing needs of health and social care organisations and individual teams.
Many of Radar Healthcare’s care partners, such as HC-One, use the software as a way 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,” emphasised Hall.
