Ben Howlett – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Ben Howlett on 2015-11-13.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to reduce variations in the quality of at-home care given by carers’ agencies across the UK.
Alistair Burt
The Government is committed to improving the quality of adult social care. We have taken a number of recent steps to do so.
In October 2014, we introduced a tougher inspection system by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Following inspections, CQC now also awards each service a single quality rating, with providers rated as “Outstanding”, “Good”, “Requires Improvement” or “Inadequate”. Services rated “Inadequate” are being placed into Special Measures. They will have access to a range of resources to help them to improve, but if they fail to do so, they could face closure.
These new ratings and other information about the type and quality of care at every care home and homecare service in the country are now available on NHS Choices and the MyNHS Transparency website, making it much easier for people to compare the quality of services.
This year we introduced a Certificate of Fundamental Care, now known as the Care Certificate. This will help ensure that care workers can deliver a consistently high quality standard of care.
The Department is funding and working with a number of organisations including the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), Skills for Care, the Social Care Institute for Excellence, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and the Local Government Association on a range of projects to help adult social care organisations and staff improve the quality of care. These resources include new NICE Quality Standards and Guidelines which bring clarity to what excellence looks like in care and Commissioning for Better Outcomes – A Route Map* that sets out a series of commissioning standards that will
be used as part of local government sector-led improvement to drive best practices in local authority commissioning under their new duties in the Care Act 2015.
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