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Single Assessment Framework version

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GO Online: Inspection toolkit

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Safe

Everybody wants to feel safe. Good and outstanding care means taking the time to understand what ‘feeling safe’ means to the people you support and providing a service that meets these needs.

Click on the sections below to see what the Â鶹ŮÀÉ will be asking when inspecting Safe, as well as our recommendations, practical examples, and resources to help you prepare.

Introducing Safe

Duration 02 min 00 sec

Everybody wants – and needs – to feel safe.

Each and every Â鶹ŮÀÉ regulated care provider has an essential role in making this happen … enabling people to live the best lives possible.

The key question that the Â鶹ŮÀÉ will want to know is … is your service safe?

To check whether the service is safe, the Â鶹ŮÀÉ inspection will look at the following:

  • Safeguarding … including how you protect people from harm and abuse
  • Involving people to manage risks … looking at how you identify and mitigate risks and help people to safely achieve personal goals

  • Safe and effective staffing … ensuring that you have the right mix of capable and confident staff at all times to meet people’s needs. This includes how you recruit and induct staff.

  • Medicine optimisation … this will explore how you support people to manage their own medicines or safely manage and administrate them otherwise
  • Infection, prevention, and control … including how you keep people safe from outbreaks and other risks

  • Safe systems, pathways, and transitions – this looks at how you safely manage people moving between services, including hospitals

  • Safe environments – ensuring where the person lives is safe environment, supported by the right equipment, facilities, and technologies.

  • Learning cultures … how you learn from them and minimise them reoccurring.

As with other areas of inspection, the Â鶹ŮÀÉ will look at the data you share and other feedback to decide when and how to inspect.

The Safe section of Â鶹ŮÀÉ’s GO Online brings together recommendations, practical examples and resources that can help you deliver Safe care.

Watch the film here:

Safe - What outstanding care looks like

Duration 02 min 07 sec

Katie Brennan, Registered Branch Manager – Carefound Â鶹ŮÀÉ Care

  • Safe to Carefound, I think is all about making sure that your clients are well looked after, but also that your clients are well looked after as well.
  • I think recruitment in care is so vital as well. We have to make sure we are getting the right people who will work well with our clients, but also that our clients are safe as well, so we are not putting them at risk with any of the staff we recruit.

Vivian Laurent, General Manager, Eglantine Villa

  • We recruit our senior staff by making sure we get the right candidate here. We will go through the preselection stage and then and then they will be invited for interview.
  • We will make the decision from there. There are a set of questions that we ask and also we walk round with them in the home and introduce them. We look at qualities about how they interact with the resident, see if they mix with the team that they have and make a decision from there.
  • The step that we take here to ensure that we have enough staff is to look at our rota and ask have we got enough staff to meet the care needs of the residents? We have got a weekly assessment that we do to look at the dependency of the resident. If ever the dependency of the resident in the home, this is when I make the decision to talk to my manager to look at the possibility of increasing staff in the home. So, we never worked understaffed.

Sarah Dew, Shared Lives Officer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council

  • We keep people safe by having risk assessments in place. So, we have Out and About Risk Assessments for people who go around independently, we have Â鶹ŮÀÉ Alone Risk Assessments, but we also have specific Risk Assessments for people who need them for other activities.
  • We meet with the carers four times a year to make sure they are doing everything they should be to keep the individual safe. We also meet with the individuals separately as well to make sure that they are happy, safe, and well looked after, and we also visit the households quite a lot to keep in touch and make sure everything is working as it should be.

Leanne Brotherton, Shared Lives Carer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council

  • How I keep the individuals safe is we talk about things like Stranger Danger, we practice things together like making a hot drink – understanding that the kettle gets warm before they touch the kettle – and act things out before we do the actual task.
  • So, if they are going out in the community, they have a mobile phone with them. They know how to use the mobile phone, and going through different things that might happen. So, if somebody would take money off them, what would they do? So it’s putting in different strategies for if the person becomes caught up in a bit of a sticky situation.

Laurie Cook, Shared Lives Support Officer, Lancashire Country Council

  • As a service we recognise that Shared Lives Carers are administrating medication on behalf of people, or overseeing their medication on their behalf, and we recognise that is often a point where things can go wrong.
  • So, we make sure all our carers feel very empowered, if you will, to help people with their medication, and we do that by monitoring closely where they store medication, and how they administer medication, how they fill in record sheets for medication.
  • Most importantly, we recognise the importance of training, and we invite all our carers onto a mandatory training every 3-years where we update them on the latest things and how we can help them to feel well supported in all aspects of medication management.

Watch the film here:

Safeguarding

How to work with people to understand what being safe means to them and with partners on the best way to achieve this. Protecting people's right to live in safety, free from bullying, harassment, abuse, discrimination, avoidable harm and neglect.

Involving people to manage risk

How to support people to understand and manage risks so that care meets their needs in a way that is safe and supportive and enables them to do the things that matter to them.

Safe and effective staffing

How to make sure there are enough qualified, skilled and experienced people receiving effective support, supervision and development to provide safe care.

Medicines optimisation

How to make sure that medicines and treatments are safe and meet people’s needs, capacities and preferences by enabling them to be involved in planning, including when changes happen.

Infection, prevention and control

How to assess and manage the risk of infection, detect and control the risk of it spreading and share any concerns with appropriate agencies promptly.

Safe systems, pathways and transitions

How to work with people and partners to establish and maintain safe systems of care, in which safety is managed, monitored and assured and there is a continuity of care when people move between different services.

Safe environments

How to detect and control potential risks in the care environment, ensuring that the equipment, facilities and technology support the delivery of safe care.

Learning culture

How to have a proactive and positive culture of safety based on openness and honesty, where safety concerns are listened to, events investigated, and lessons learned.


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