Care with Kindness

Care With Kindness Limited COVID-19 Statement

Care With Kindness will ensure that safe, effective procedures are in place for staff and service users during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are keeping abreast of changes introduced by the government during the spread of the virus, and we are committed to responding quickly and with flexibility to all requirements for social care workers whilst upholding the safety and wellbeing of our clients as a matter of priority.

As care providers, we ensure robust infection control and business continuity plans so that we are prepared for the unexpected and are able to act with speed and efficiency in the event of disruptions to our service.

Our care staff are trained in infection prevention and control, Covid-19, health and safety and first aid. All staff are familiar with our Covid-19 policy and procedure, and they understand that they all have a responsibility for ensuring the safety of service users and for reducing the risk of infection and cross-contamination.

Staff follow good infection control and prevention techniques, and they support service users with this too. Care With Kindness ensures that staff have access to reliable information to reduce anxiety and dispel any myths and inaccurate information that may cause worry or distress to staff, service users or the wider public.

Care With Kindness will ensure that staff follow the WHO advice to reduce the risk of contracting the virus and the risk of spreading it including rigorous hand hygiene, the wearing of personal protective equipment and a commitment to keeping the home environment clean and in good order.

Care With Kindness will follow confidentiality and GDPR policies and procedures to ensure that the details of staff involved in caring for service users with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 is kept confidential. Employees also respect each other’s confidentiality and take care not to inadvertently share information when using social media.

Steps are taken to mitigate any risks resulting from staff shortages and absences caused by the need for staff to isolate on contracting the virus. Daily Lateral Flow Detection tests are undertaken by all care staff due to visit clients in their own homes before the start of their shift. This measure has been introduced in response to testing guidance for home care staff recently published by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) to ensure that staff and the people they care for remain protected from Covid-19.

In the event that a service user develops Covid-19 symptoms, Care With Kindness staff will ensure that appropriate isolation measures are put in place, the relevant healthcare services are contacted, and family members are kept informed. Staff will uphold social distancing as a matter of priority.

Care With Kindness will follow the advice of the local health protection team, Public Health England, the Department of Health and Social Care and WHO in order to uphold the safety of staff and service users at all times.

Care With Kindness has effective procedures in place to allow staff to raise any concerns in relation to equipment, policies and processes for managing COVID-19.

Confidentiality & Disclosure of Information

In the course of their duties staff employed by Care With Kindness will be privy to confidential information concerning people’s private affairs.

It is a condition of employment with Care With Kindness that such information shall not be disclosed to any unauthorised third party without the express consent of the person, or if the person is proven not to have capacity, the person’s immediate family or advocate/legal representative.

Confidential information will not be sought from a person unless expressly in the best interests of that person, i.e. to enable a better Care Plan to be developed.

The person shall be kept informed at all times of the outcome of confidential discussions by the care staff concerning them.

It is the policy of Care With Kindness that the person has the right of access to their personal records or Case Notes at any time, in accordance with (Regulation 17 Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations, the ICO’s Right of Access, Data Protection legislation (including GDPR) requirements and the Accessible Information Standard.

Care staff will always consult their immediate supervisor or manager if they are unclear with respect to any item concerning confidentiality, or when made privy to confidential information that may have legal and / or criminal connotations (e.g. if a person confides that they have allegedly been submitted to sexual or any type of abuse by a staff member).

People who use the service have access to the company’s Confidentiality Policy and staff must explain the procedure in the event of a breach of confidentiality and ensure that the person understands the policy.

There is a written agreement on confidentiality with all social and health care agencies providing services to people living in the home. This agreement sets out the principles governing the sharing of information.

ALL staff employed by Care With Kindness will comply with the confidentiality policy and not disclose any information regarding people in their care or their colleagues to anyone outside of their place of work. Disciplinary action will take place if staff are heard to be disclosing any confidential information outside of the work place.

Complaints Policy and Procedure

Care With Kindness strives to achieve the very best outcomes for its clients all the time. However, on occasion, things can go wrong, and as such, may be the subject of a complaint. If they do, we need to know about it so we can put it right, learn from our mistakes, and implement organisational, procedural or operational changes to reduce the potential for complaints in the future. It is Care With Kindness’ commitment to:

always take complaints seriously and investigate them fairly
deal with complaints according to the organisational complaints’ procedure, unless minor
treat complaints confidentially
never discriminate against a client for making a complaint
ensuring that clients know how to make a complaint if they wish to do so.

Complaints may be made directly by clients, or they may be made on behalf of a client if the client is unable or unwilling to undertake the process alone.

All service users have the right to complain about the standard of service provided, action or lack of action or decisions taken.

Please request a copy of our Complaints Policy and Procedure should you wish to make a complaint about our service.

Transparency and Fairness Within our Service

Care With Kindness is committed to promoting a culture of fairness and transparency which will be led by the manager and senior staff members of our team. They will be responsible for embedding into the attitudes and conduct of staff the need to be open and fair in their dealings and approach with service users and their families.

All staff undergo a vigorous induction process where the values of fairness and transparency are reinforced.

In the event of an incident, staff understand their responsibility to demonstrate accountability and report the incident according to our organisational policy and procedure. It is the responsibility of the Registered Manager according to their duty of candour to provide full support to service users and their families to discuss, act upon and document a resolution to any concern or incident that has occurred.

As part of a holistic care package, we are required to work with other professionals and stakeholders from other organisations in the delivery of care services. This will be done so with openness, fairness and transparency to ensure that the best possible outcomes are achieved for the service user.

Quality Assurance

Care With Kindness is committed to delivering quality services. The goal is to offer continuous improvement, ensuring effectiveness, efficiency and value. This will be achieved within a framework of equality and values that promote the rights and desires of elderly people living in their own homes.

We at Care With Kindness, believe no matter how good its present service, there is always room for improvement and that every member of staff should demonstrate a total commitment to quality and quality improvement in every aspect of their work.

Delivery of our services involves working within several externally imposed quality frameworks that define standards. The most important of these include:

Essential standards of Quality and Safety; Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE’s) (CQC)
Health & Social Care Act 2008 & Applicable Publications
Other regulatory standards, e.g. health & safety/Nice guidance
Contracts compliance as set by the placing authority

In general, these external quality frameworks all aim to ensure that quality is built into services through setting and implementation of standards, through processes for review, and through monitoring to ensure that services meet the needs of service users and other stakeholders.

We are aware that other key aspects of quality assurance include mechanisms for the monitoring or auditing of services to ensure they are being delivered as originally intended. These include:

Provider’s report
Incident, accident and near miss reporting
Audit reports
Service user questionnaires, family/advocates questionnaires, stakeholder questionnaires, staff questionnaires
Policy and procedure monitoring and reviews
Complaints and compliments monitoring
Rigorous recruitment process
Health & safety audits
Ongoing compliance audits

Quality assurance begins and ends with Care With Kindness service users. For any quality assurance programme to be successful, their views must be sought on a regular basis and action taken if a service no longer appears to be meeting their needs.

Our continuing aim is to provide a professional and efficient service to meet all the requirements of Care With Kindness service users. The long-term goal is to obtain the highest level of satisfaction from service users. To support this, service users will, depending on the nature of Care With Kindness and the ability of the people, have the following opportunities for involvement:

In consultation with the service users and families and where possible we will strive to undertake the following:

Family meetings - to enable families to work in partnership with staff and service user.
Team meetings and group supervisions - to ensure all aspects of the key working contract is fulfilled and to jointly discuss issues concerning the day-to-day running of Care With Kindness, its activities and policies and procedures
One-off meetings – where there are specific important issues or changes on which service users should be consulted, one-off meetings can be organised.
Care plan meetings are to be held monthly for each service user. The service user and/or their representative is to attend if possible and the meeting recorded in the care plan.

Service users will be given the opportunity to say what they think about Care With Kindness. This will be carried out in the most meaningful way to the user and should be achieved through service users’ surveys and face-to-face meetings. Surveys will be confidential, but a summary of the results will be available and given to all Care With Kindness service users, and/or their representatives. The Care Quality Commission (CQC), family/advocates and stakeholders can also view the summaries. The manager of Care With Kindness is responsible for preparing and distributing the questionnaire formats and collating the results at least annually.

The views, suggestions and complaints of service users and others concerning any aspect of the running of Care With Kindness will be welcomed, listened to, and acted upon promptly.

Satisfaction surveys are to be sent to outside professionals or stakeholders annually, families/ advocates and to staff members. The manager of Care With Kindness is responsible for the distribution at least annually with each group and collation of data. These surveys are confidential, but summaries of the information will be made available.

Care With Kindness holds reviews for each service user every six months and (if applicable) the funding authority will normally attend once a year. The review allows the user, stakeholder and family/ advocate to discuss with Care With Kindness what level of care the individual is receiving and to voice any concerns or positive aspects. These reviews are recorded and retained on the care records.

Care With Kindness will have a continuous development plan for quality improvement, based upon feedback from service users, staff and others. The improvement plan will become part of an agreed ‘live’ ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. The plan becomes ‘live’ because it is regularly reviewed, amended and added to. A bimonthly Quality Assurance Committee will receive risk and governance reports for scrutiny and review.

The files which will provide evidence of continuous improvement include:

Complaints, suggestions, and compliments, good and innovative practice
Health & safety – risk assessments, fire officer, and environmental officer
CQC inspections
Management – budgets, procedures, guidelines, codes of practice
Service users & or their representatives – surveys, meetings and individual comments
Staff – meetings & individual comments, training, conferences

A key responsibility of the Registered Manager of Care With Kindness is to ensure that any agreed improvements are carried out. In implementing the programme, the following should be included:

Discussion with the staff team and service users to ensure clarity over the improvements required
Ensuring that a person given a specific improvement task is clear what the task is, the standard required, and the level of authority and responsibility they have in achieving the task
Ensuring that a method is in place for checking progress, e.g. service user meetings, supervision and staff meetings
Promoting among service users and staff the concepts of a team approach and commitment to service improvement.

An important element of the improvement process is operational management follow-up. The Nominated Individual’s role is to confirm that the identified improvements have been carried out and that they meet an acceptable standard. In the follow-up consideration should be given to ensure that:

A timetable is established, to review progress and to give a clear signal to service users and staff that management is committed to improvement
The best possible forums for promoting achievement and commitment to improvement are used
All the improvement tasks are reviewed
Help is given to resolve any problems that are being encountered in achieving any improvement

The Quality Assurance Committee will receive a bimonthly governance report for scrutiny and review.

Training

In order to provide a quality service, Care With Kindness requires staff to be suitably trained, supervised and supported. In particular, we will support the following:

Each member of staff will have a personal development plan/ portfolio in which their training needs are identified, and a plan made as to how such needs will be met/li>
Each member of staff will be offered training to meet regulation and national standards.

All staff have an induction period to include their mandatory training modules, familiarisation with company policy and procedure, and to complete their Care Certificate. We will enable new care staff to shadow those with more experience until they feel confident to work alone.

All staff will have to obtain a satisfactory enhanced DBS check and supply 2 references before any employment commences.