WIREDGOV

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has yesterday published its first guideline for the social care sector on how to plan and deliver person-centred care for older people living in their own homes.

Amongst other recommendations, the NICE guideline advises home care providers to:

• Ensure services support the aspirations, goals and priorities of each person, and that they and their carers are treated with empathy, courtesy and respect.
• Make sure support focuses on what people can or would like to do, not just what they can’t do.
• Prioritise continuity of care by ensuring the person has the same home care worker or workers so that they can become familiar and build a relationship.

The NICE guideline also includes recommendations to support home care workers, from training and development to highlighting the need for services to ensure they have enough time to offer sufficient care and support for people in a caring and compassionate way.

Our role is to inspect, rate and regulate services to assess what the quality and safety of care is like for people receiving it. While we do not have a role in enforcing guidance from NICE or from other bodies, we expect all providers to have regard for any evidence-based, best practice guidance that is in the interests of people receiving safe, caring and high-quality care.

Welcoming the publication of NICE’s first guideline for social care, Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care at the Care Quality Commission, said: “CQC inspections have found a wide variation in the delivery of home care services – we have seen some great care, but also care that does not meet the standards people who use these services have every right to expect. I hope that staff and providers will use the NICE guideline to improve the quality of care they provide which should help them to achieve a rating of Good or Outstanding.

"I am pleased that the NICE guideline has emphasised the importance of person-centred care and the need to recruit, support and train home care workers appropriately. These are key areas we focus on in our inspections."

Since we formally rolled out our new inspection regime last October, we have awarded 1,257 ratings to home care services. Of these: 4% (51) are ‘Inadequate’, 28% (355) are ‘Requires Improvement’, 67% (842) are ‘Good’ and 1% (9) are ‘Outstanding’. We plan to have inspected every home care and other adult social care service by the end of September 2016.

For further information about NICE’s guideline, please visit their website.