Community Integrated Care (CIC), a national, not-for-profit social and health care provider – and a registered charity - is one of the largest in the United Kingdom, delivering diverse support and care services such as supporting people with learning disabilities or mental health issues as well as providing residential and nursing care for the elderly and domiciliary care to people in their own homes. CIC also provides treatment for substance misuse and accommodation for the homeless.
In accordance with Care Quality Commission (CQC) requirements under the Health and Social Care Act, CIC were required to register compliance of their services under the new framework. In order to do this, they had to carry out audits on over 300 services they provide. The group also needed to be able to track any Non-Compliance across their services and have the ability to report their findings.
Q-Pulse, the compliance management solution developed by Gael Ltd, was chosen to help them meet those regulatory requirements effectively.
Kim Neale, Quality and Performance Manager at CIC, said: “We needed a system that would allow us to monitor individual registration of each of our services and their managers to help us keep within new CQC requirements that were brought in.
“We implemented Q-Pulse to help us achieve compliance more easily as we didn’t have a proper, user friendly system in place for our staff. I had previous experience of Q-Pulse and recommended that the solution was put in place here as it gave us the holistic view of our premises and services that we needed.”
The CIC’s Q-Pulse QMS saw the charity implement a selection of the solution’s modules including Supplier, CA/PA, Analysis and Audit.
Kim added: “We have adapted the Supplier module to give us the flexibility we needed to record the independent registration information of our own services. Together with the CA/PA module, this has helped us monitor each individual service location and manager so we can easily flag up non-conformances. Q-Pulse also allowed us to track operational incidents, helping to increase our improvement activities. We now have a single place in which actions can be tracked for each location irrespective of the source, making management of the services more effective.”
Kim added: “Q-Pulse has been invaluable for us and really helped us work towards achieving compliance with the CQC requirements. Since implementation we have seen a whole host of benefits, none more so than increasing the ability to easily analyse information. All of our information used to be held in a variety of places around the business – such as on spreadsheets and word documents - and the system was extremely disconnected. It proved difficult when trying to report back each month but Q-Pulse helped us gain control and made it easier to both reach and achieve compliance.”