Governance & Quality Assurance Policy (Dom Care)

How does quality assurance work in home care?

Quality assurance means the planned checks that show whether care meets the standard it should. In a home care agency, care workers often work alone in people's homes and the manager cannot see care as it happens. So this policy leans on spot checks, call monitoring and direct feedback.

The law behind it is regulation 17, good governance. It says the provider must set up systems to check and improve quality and safety, reduce risk, keep secure records and act on feedback. Those systems must also work. CQC lists governance and quality assurance policies among the documents for registration.

Who does what

The provider holds overall responsibility through the nominated individual, the person named to CQC as responsible for supervising the management of the regulated activity. It does not accept new care packages the agency cannot staff safely. The Registered Manager runs the checks day to day and reports to the provider each month. Care workers log in and out of each visit using call monitoring and report concerns straight away.

The home care audit timetable

• Daily: call monitoring for late, short and missed visits, and any accidents or safeguarding concerns from the last 24 hours

• Weekly: rotas, visit records and medicines records

• Monthly: medicines and care plan audits, spot checks in people's homes, missed visit trends, incidents, complaints and training

• Quarterly: review calls with people and families, and staff file audits

• Yearly: satisfaction surveys, a review of the statement of purpose and an annual quality report

Each audit leads to an action plan with an owner and a date, and all actions sit on one service improvement plan that the manager reviews monthly and the provider checks at governance meetings. If a check finds a risk to someone's safety, the manager acts the same day.

Before you use it

Add your own meeting dates, audit tools, call monitoring system and the names of the people in each role. The timetable must match what you do. The policy also lists your legal duties to CQC, from notifying deaths, serious injuries and abuse without delay to giving notice when the Registered Manager will be away for 28 days or more.

Late and missed visits feed straight into the monthly review, so pair this with the Missed Visits Policy & Procedure. Your yearly checks use the Service User Satisfaction Survey and a fresh look at your Statement of Purpose.