Quality Matters aims to achieve a shared understanding of what high-quality care is, more effective and aligned support for quality in adult social care, and improved quality that we can measure.
It involves everyone who uses, provides, commissions or supports adult social care services, and explains how we can all work together to improve the quality of adult social care.
The Quality Matters initiative, is a shared commitement to high quality person-centred adult social care and brings together useful tools and resources to help you to understand and answer:
- what does quality mean to me
- how do I assess quality in my service
- what measures can I use to understand quality
- how will I know if the actions that I’ve taken have improved quality?
Inspiring quality in social care: celebrating quality now and creating quality in future
This event gave participants the chance to explore people’s experiences and perspectives about what quality means in adult social care, both now in pandemic management and recovery planning, and what quality social care means in the future.
What does quality mean to me?
What quality means to you will be very individual. It might link to your own or families’ experience, and could consider factors such as what things cost, certain brands and locations. Everyone’s idea of quality will be slightly different.
These resources will help you to think about what quality means to you and your service and some will help you to understand how commissioners and others think about quality.
Making it Real
Making it Real, is a framework from Think Local Act Personal that sets out what good personalised care and support looks like. It’s an easy to use set of statements that focus on what matters to people, and describe what ‘good’ looks like from an individual’s perspective and what organisations should be doing to live up to those expectations. It’s an excellent tool to help define, assess and measure quality.
The six themes of Making it Real are:
- wellbeing and independence: living the life I want, keeping safe and well
- information and advice: having the information I need, when I need it
- active and supportive communities: keeping family, friends and connections
- flexible and integrated care and support: my own support, my own way
- when things need to change: staying in control
- workforce: the people who support me.
The framework can be used to help individuals, groups and services to think about what’s happening locally and to explore how well their aspiration are being met and what needs to change. The statements can be used as the basis for conversations between service providers and people who use their services, to assess how well the service is doing and to focus on making things better.
Adult Social Care: Quality Matters
The ‘Our single shared vision for quality’ section in Adult Social Care: Quality matters shares a vision of what high-quality care means, which has been co-produced by people who use, work in and commission social care services. It shares a vision from the perspective of people who use services and for those that provide services.
Care and health improvement
The Care and Health Improvement Programme, from the Local Government Association (LGA) provides support for social care, integration and health at a local and/or system level. It includes information, resources and support about a range of topics including commissioning and market shaping, health and wellbeing systems, innovation and transformation, making safeguarding personal, public health and prevention, and managing transfers of care.
Registered managers and others in adult social care organisations might find it useful to understand some of the ways that local systems approach quality improvement and find opportunities to get involved.
This work is supported by a network of regional Care and Health Improvement Advisers.
Find the contact details for your regional adviser.