How Can Care Homes Become “Outstanding”?

• Ensuring Safety: Prioritize resident safety through well-designed facilities and attentive staff. Care homes should be easy to navigate with quality facilities, and staff should be compassionate and readily available to assist residents.
• Compassionate Staff: Exceptional care requires selfless, compassionate staff willing to go above and beyond. Achieving an outstanding rating demands staff who are dedicated to the well-being and comfort of residents.
• Responsive Care: Staff responsiveness is critical for meeting residents’ needs promptly. Care homes should implement effective management systems and maintain adequate staffing levels to ensure residents receive timely assistance when required.
• Effective Leadership: Leadership plays a crucial role in fostering a culture of compassion and excellence within the care home. A compassionate leadership team is essential for creating a positive environment where staff are empowered to provide high-quality care and residents’ needs are consistently met.

To ensure that the standard of care is always kept high across the country, care homes are rated by an external body, the Care Quality Commission.

In order to achieve the highest rating possible, “outstanding”, the care home in question must meet a variety of different criteria relating to both the staff and the building itself.

However, only 3.5% of care homes in the UK are actually able to meet this standard. Let’s take a look at some of the key factors that would influence such a score.

Ways to improve safety in care homes

In order for a care home to be rated outstanding, the safety of the residents is absolutely paramount.

This can be achieved by meeting two key criteria: 1) a well-designed care home with easy-to-navigate rooms and quality facilities, and 2) attentive staff who are always on hand to help the residents.

Caring staff

While “caring staff” might seem like an obvious requirement, it’s difficult in practice for homes to meet the level of care necessary to achieve a high rating.

Staff must be selfless, compassionate and be willing to go above and beyond the call of duty in order to achieve an outstanding rating

Responsiveness of staff within care homes

Caring staff are essential to an outstanding care home, but this is only part of the story.

In order to properly meet the needs of the residents, a care home must be structured in such a way that staff can be there when they are needed most.

This means that management systems need to be put in place and staffing levels should always be high.

How effective care home leadership can help care homes

Leadership and staff can have the best intentions in the world, but if the treatments and care provided don’t produce happy residents and observable results, then a care home can’t be rated highly.

Leadership

For a care home to flourish, the leadership team needs to be just as caring as the rest of the staff.

Ultimately, a care home’s reputation is built on compassionate choices made by those at the top level, and an open and fair culture needs to be fostered if the organisation is to thrive.

Aedifice Partnership is a leading consultancy and project management firm specializing in delivering high-quality projects across various sectors, including care homes, residential properties, education establishments, and commercial properties.

Our range of services includes project management, chartered building surveys, CDM and quantity surveying among others.

At Aedifice Partnership, we manage new care home construction as well as refurbishment projects throughout the UK.

For further details on the services Aedifice Partnership offer, contact us for a friendly chat.