Improvement reviews | Towards Outstanding

Who are improvement reviews for?

NB Currently we are only able to offer care home reviews outside of England because of a potential conflict of interest. We have a good understanding of the frameworks across the rest of the UK and are happy to offer this service in Wales, Ireland or Scotland.

Our improvement and compliance reviews are for all providers of health and social care - Whether you are a care home provider, a private ambulance service, an NHS trust, a community care provider, an emergency department or an operating theatre team, we can support your journey towards becoming an outstanding service the delivers excellence to the people using your services.

We will ensure our team has the experiences and skills to carry out a comprehensive review of your service (or part of your service) and identify areas of good practice that can be built on and areas where you might want to focus improvement work.

We do not inspect, we are not a regulator, although many of our teams have regulatory experience. They bring that expertise and offer a supportive review of how well the service is providing care, how well led it is, what the strengths of the service are and where the provider may want to consider making changes to take the service to the next level in terms of the quality of the provision.

We understand the frameworks of the UK regulators and can consider those during our site visits, but our own frameworks are more in depth, focusing on elements of care provision that can take good services towards excellence. We try to understand the experiences of people using the services and help providers turn that feedback into an organisational development tool.

We are thorough in our approach and intolerant of poor care: We will not work with providers who have major breaches of safeguarding regulations. Keeping people safe from abuse is such a fundamental that every provider should be compliant. We will coach and support providers, leaders and staff teams to take steps along their journey towards excellence.

We bring together teams of experts that are appropriate to the setting to ensure that we have the skills and current knowledge to build on best practice and make recommendations. We can review care homes for older people or for people with physical disabilities, but can also look in detail at individual wards, rehabilitation services, community hospitals or children's services.

We can review the entire service or look in detail at one or more specific aspect of the service provision. That might mean guiding the service towards ensuring they reduce the risks associated with a closed culture, looking at how to ensure that all people receive an equal quality of service, or reviewing the governance arrangements.

What do we look at during our reviews?

The aim of our comprehensive reviews is to really understand how your service delivers care and what the experience of people using the service is. We look at how safe people are, how you provide the basic care to ensure people do not suffer harm or iatrogenic illness.

We want to know that people are offered choice and have as much autonomy as possible.

We look at the quality of food and activities, considering social contact and how you avoid the risks of a closed culture.

We look at the safety of a service, what the track record on managing safety incidents is and whether national guidance is followed. This might mean looking at how well you implement pre-operative surgical safety checklists or the appropriate management of opioid medicines. It might be looking over risk assessments for if alcohol is provided with lunch or checking for ligature points.

We look at whether care and treatment is personalised and considers individual preferences and needs.

We want to see recognition and celebration of difference.

As leadership is so important in any service, we spend time understanding the culture, the governance and the support for learning and innovation. In larger or more complex organisations, we want to understand the relationship between corporate support and leadership and local leadership.

For reviews around specific areas of care provision or compliance, we offer a service specific plan. As all services are different, we provide a bespoke review that enables services to develop what they do and ensures that good practice is evidenced to show compliance.

We offer the service in the UK and internationally.