How do we quality assure providers?
Quality assurance is a process to evaluate and improve service user and customer experience, safety and service effectiveness. A consistent and structured approach for quality assurance will drive improvements in service quality for service users and customers.
We quality assure providers by:
- gathering in-depth, real-time intelligence about the quality of commissioned services to inform assurance activity and judgements, with a focus on information from and about individual customers - measuring outcomes is a principal measure for quality assurance of services
- proactively deploying the Quality Assurance and Improvement Team in the market to observe practice, gain customer insight and work proactively with providers to assure quality and intervene early where there are sustained concerns.
Ensuring our contracts are being delivered by commissioned providers as specified; using an outcome-based approach and reacting to significant failures in the market in a robust and consistent way.
Once the quality of care and support has been assessed we will work collaboratively with providers to improve that quality as required. All providers will be striving to constantly improve the quality of what they do - this in itself is a marker of quality. In some cases, providers may not have reached the agreed standards and will need to take specific action to remedy these shortfalls. We will help providers improve their quality by:
- encouraging them to record and report on their plans to improve their quality.
- where specific shortfalls exist, we will highlight these to the provider and work with them to write a SMARTER improvement plan focused on tackling these shortfalls.
- provide signposting to sources of support to help providers develop effective, evidence-based action plans.
- monitor their progress against the improvement plans to ensure they move to a position of delivering care and support at the standards we expect.