Old and young lady - Advantage Accreditation

CQC report finds good care in mental health services

Although the media will no doubt focus on the negatives, a new CQC report on the state of care in mental health services has actually uncovered a lot of good news.

A study of mental health services conducted between 2014 and 2017 has found that 68% of core services provided by the NHS are good and 6% outstanding, while the ratio is 72% and 4% respectively for independent services. Among those services for which special praise were delivered were community services for those with learning disabilities or autism. Even providers labelled as requiring improvement have made “real progress”.

Unfortunately, the report also highlights a “substantial minority” of services where improvement is needed, and cited a number of familiar areas of concern, including staffing shortages, locked rehabilitation wards, poor quality clinical information systems, and the variation in the use of physical restraint and restrictive practices.

The latter is certainly a hot topic in the sector today, and the reason behind Skills for Care’s recent push on positive behaviour support. Clearly, services needed to embed the latest guidance in their training programmes more deeply to achieve change.

The full report and data is available on the CQC website.

Old lady

New report shows the importance of basic skills

A number of news outlets are leading today with the news that the CQC has found that 32% of nursing homes in England and Wales are failing on safety:

Inspectors making unannounced visits to care homes found medicines being administered unsafely, alarm calls going unanswered and residents not getting help to eat or use the toilet. Some residents were found to have been woken up by night-shift care workers, washed and then put back to bed, apparently to make life easier for staff.

Training, recruitment and retention of skilled staff was cited by the CQC's chief inspector of adult social care, Andrea Sutcliffe, as one of the key causes for failed safety standards across the sector:

“Many of these homes are struggling to recruit and retain well-qualified nursing staff and that means that this is having an impact on delivering good services to people who have got very complex needs".

This shows that staff training is still a difficult issue for many facilities. It is likely that this is going to become a hot issue for the CQC over the coming months and years. 

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