Supporting individuals in a safe and regulated setting
Consensus takes the care and safety of the people we support extremely seriously. All our services are inspected at least once a year by our internal Care Services Team. Our services are all registered with the relevant external care regulator, which regularly monitors and inspects each service too. This combined approach helps to ensure that the people we support receive the quality care they deserve at all times.
The care regulator in England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), analyses whether our services are safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well led. It rates services as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate. The Welsh and Scottish regulators have differently worded standards and ratings which are broadly similar.
The Consensus Care Services Team acts like our own internal regulator. Members of the team perform regular audits and inspections of our services to ensure that they are operating over and above the standards set by our regulators and commissioners. Sometimes the service will know they’re coming. Other times they won’t. If the audit shows any weaknesses in a service, the Care Services Team will work quickly with the service team to create an action plan to put things right.
The team is also continually improving the systems and practices we use across our services. They regularly review policies and procedures to reflect evolving best practice.
We use a combination of other approaches to keep the individuals we support safe.
- We ensure that anyone we plan to employ first passes a criminal record check from the Disclosure and Barring Service. This shows they are safe to work with vulnerable adults (and children, where appropriate).
- All our service teams receive the latest training, this includes training in safeguarding, in the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLs).
- Operational managers who oversee services perform regular audits and highlight issues to the Consensus management board.
- We request regular feedback from individuals, families and commissioners to find out what we’re doing well and where we can improve.
- We’ve also built a range of risk management processes and responsibilities into our organisation.
In short, we never compromise on quality or safety.