Valued Care Solutions

Working with an ethos of person centredness and an active nurturing of community asset based approaches, the range of quality services available from VCS include:

Quality Assurance Compliance

A high level of efficient quality assurance provisions which reflect an ethos in person centred care and the part they play in creating connected communities, which is vital when building positive compliance in an organisation with regulators and their bodies.

As a result VCS has created a menu of quality compliance supports that will ensure that your organisation is compliant on all levels. These include:

• Full comprehensive independent audit of your organisation and its service delivery (based on CQC regulations)
• Individual Key ine of Enquiry (KLOE) and 5 Key Questions – compliance audits (based on CQC regulations)
• Individual Monthly External Audits – (based on CQC Regulation 17, Well-led KLOE, and the fundamental standards of quality)
• Dementia service and environment audit

Each audit is supported by a full report detailing findings and the provision of additional services in order to complete a full Red/Amber/Green rated action plan.

Positive Engagement

Positive engagement is the opportunity to actively reach all individuals involved in service provisions, ensuring that all perspectives of delivery and/or change are brought together to sustain supports.

VCS support positive engagement, communication and involvement for all through including:

• People – Using person centred techniques enables communication and engagement with people who receive your service to ensure that their valued personal views on service supports and future provisions are listened to and developed accordingly. These engagements take various forms including facilitation of group forums, electronic communications or direct one-to-one conversations.
• Staff – Positive wellbeing of staff starts with honest and open engagement. Supporting and enabling management to communicate at appropriate levels with all staff ensures that they feel part of your organisation, have a voice in continuous improvement and development of the service and overall increases their positive wellbeing whilst performing their working role.
• Local Communities – Encouraging the provision of community asset based approaches VCS work with and support organisations to understand their position within the local community. Following this,development of strong engagement and communication with all areas of the local community is undertaken to connect your assets to support the local community and investigate how the local community can in turn support and partner services.
• Partners – Working closely with organisations and partners can clearly identify and encourage engagement and communication to ensure that your services have the most effective network of support available to achieve all organisational goals, as well as supporting local partner outcomes.

Positive Change Management

Social Care is an ever changing market and as such organisations need to be open to continuous improvement and change in order to stay up to date with current legislation and regulations, as well as developing services that meet the needs of people living within their own communities.

For too long change management has been driven by traditional means of introducing new laws and policies or being set by controlling commissioners.

VCS supports organisations to challenge and change that method and focus on another way, a way of 'Pro-active Positive Change Management'.

Using various methods and techniques to nurture positive changes include:

• Action Research Learning
• Solution Focussed Approaches
• Person Centred Approaches
• Community Asset Based Approaches
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Empathetic Change

Working with organisations, their teams and people who receive services alongside communities supports the creation of 'Pro-active Positive Change Management' plans that really focus on understanding and meeting the needs of all involved.

If you want to know more about how these can work for your organisation then please feel free to contact me to discuss how this can be achieved.

Business Planning

Best practice highlights organisations’ strategic and operational business plans supporting appropriately outline business goals. From experience these tend to be very static documents that are only reviewed annually when a progress and delivery of outcomes report is requested.

VCS challenges this way of delivering business planning by creating a space to facilitate organisations in developing organic business plans that are nurtured and evolve throughout the working year whilst they meet flexible outcomes set.

Using this approach the organic business plan is a live document, highlighting continuous improvement actions and appreciates the current need of the business, the people receiving its supports and the whole service delivery at all times.

VCS know that from time to time organisations are looking to change direction but are unsure of how to set out goals or outcomes that are flexible enough to deliver positive valued change.

Again using the above approach with organisations, plans are developed and target outcomes that reflect service provision changes in a way that can be easily understood by people receiving supports, stakeholders, staff and the wider community.

Mentoring

One of the latest support services available from VCS is the requirement for positive mentoring at all levels of an organisation.

Often witnessed are senior management teams demanding changes within their organisation that they believe to be appropriate at the time, however have completely missed the focus or demand of the people delivering and receiving the service. Employees have stated that they wished the management had involved them or at least spoken to them about how to manage the change.

In supporting the CQC’s Well-Led KLOE regulation, it has been identified on many occasions that management leadership through external mentoring is vital in proving high quality service provision and delivery.

VCS quality mentoring programmes look to establish quickly how your organisation is being led, in terms of provision, and how this can be positively enhanced with external mentoring to management and their teams.

Use of positive person centred mentoring gains positive engagement with the individuals in need of mentoring support within your organisation whilst always ensuring that they understand the focus of what the organisation is wishing to achieve.

External Supervision and Appraisal

The very latest support service to be offered has been developed after being approached by a residential home client who wished to have external supervision and appraisals supports for their management.

They saw the benefit of having an independent external support for supervision of the main home manager and management team instead of it being completed in-house.

This service provides the home owner with an independent honest reflection of the management team in supervision and an annual appraisal. It also provides those in supervision a valued communication point (not the owner) in highlighting areas for improvement and change.

VCS can offer a range of supervision and appraisals services including:

• Full year of supervision and appraisal programme
• Individual supervision and appraisal sessions
• Supervision and appraisal awareness sessions for supervising employees

VCS supervision and appraisal programme is linked directly with the Chartered Management Institute and Care Quality Commission guidelines on effective employee supervision and appraisal.

The above list is not exhaustive and through initial discussions a tailored support package can be developed for any area of service that your organisation considers is in need of quality improvement.