August 15, 2024
Sharing best practice – raising CQC awareness across your team
This is the first in a series sharing good ideas which may help practices look at their ways of working.
Our Q&A focuses on CQC and how to raise awareness of it across your wider team.
Catherine Farrington, practice manager at Westbury on Trym Primary Care Centre, shares the simple measures she’s implemented and the big impact they’ve had:
What is the single thing that has most helped raise CQC awareness in your practice?
We have put up two CQC information boards. We have one board dedicated to ‘who does what at WOT’ which lists all our lead roles, and another that has all the health and safety posters, Display Energy Certificates, and information on where, for example, our emergency equipment is kept. All the day-to-day things everyone needs to know about.
And you also pose a CQC question of the week on the board?
Yes, the question of the week is put up on the white board where we hold our morning huddles. This keeps the CQC as a topic of conversation, and shows staff the information they need to know. Here are some of the questions we have had and answered on the board:
- where is the accident book?
- where is the fire assembly point?
- where is the emergency equipment?
- where is the Employer Liability Certificate?
- where do we have the CQC rating on display? Do we have to display our rating?
- who is our health and safety lead?
- who is our SIRO?
At the moment I tend to update the question but I plan to move to the management team coming up with questions too. I’d really like to get to a point where the whole team can come up with questions.
On a scale of 1-5 (5 being the highest), how effective do you think the boards have been?
I’d say 4 out of 5! The boards gives our team one place to go for the key information they need, which saves them having to search for it or ask where it might be. It’s a great visual prompt.
Have you noticed any specific improvements or outcomes, by doing what you are doing?
We’ve definitely noticed increased staff confidence from having as much information as possible in one place. Our staff don’t have to remember everything, and the information is constantly familiar and familiarity breeds confidence. The boards keep CQC as a continued subject of conversation and focus rather just than being something you only do in the run-up to an inspection. Our building looks better with lovely notice boards too!
What else do you do to make sure your team is kept up to date with CQC information?
A staff newsletter. We’ve found the key is to keep it to one side of A4 so staff can read it quickly. On occasion we have an accompanying one side attachment with a CQC focus on subjects like information governance, or summarising a policy such as antibribery and fraud. We currently produce it monthly with occasional additional notifications when something changes i.e. Covid-19 vaccination guidance. However, we flex with the needs of the team and provide more frequent communications if updates are coming through thick and fast!
If your approaches were adopted by other practices, what resources do you think they might need to implement them?
A large notice board on a wall that people walk past frequently. A white board or a place on the wall to write the question of the week works really well. It’s a simple fix but we’ve found that it’s made a real difference to levels of CQC knowledge among the team. Treat the boards like a member of the team; regularly check-in with them to keep them up-to-date and regularly remind people that they are in place to help. If a board isn’t helping and isn’t being regularly referred to, then it is not reaching its full potential and it’s time for a performance review!
If your practice has any good ideas it would like to share, please get in touch: practice.support@onecare.org.uk
Sharing best practice – raising CQC awareness across your team
