Due to the personal nature of the care sector, patient safety is the single most important issue for all care home owners and managers. Due to several recent high profile cases of abuse and poor service, the sector and its workers, yet again, find themselves in the spotlight when it comes to safety and training.

In a recent CQC report Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care at the Care Quality Commission, said: “It appears to be increasingly difficult for some providers to deliver the safe, high quality and compassionate care people deserve and have every right to expect. With demand for social care expected to rise over the next two decades, this is more worrying than ever.”

It would seem that providing staff with mandatory training and ticking boxes is no longer enough to ensure a safe service. The use of technology within the sector has allowed us to make the shift from non-compliance to compliance but the focus now needs to be on competence.

“Competence can be described as the combination of training, skills, experience and knowledge that a person has and their ability to apply them to perform a task safely.” Health and Safety Executive

But how can competence be demonstrated? Competence isn’t about training, employers can’t just put their staff “on a course” anymore. Organisations need to prove that their employees have understood the training and have the skills and experience to carry out their duties to an expected level. It is only by proving that staff are competent that a business can minimise their risk of employing staff who cannot provide a safe service.

How can competency be managed without increasing administration time and L&D costs?

CareShield, is the UK’s leading providers of workforce development solutions has invested over £10m in a revolutionary workforce development system that allows managers to document, monitor and report on all aspects of L&D, including competence management.

Utilising CareShield’s industry leading learning methodologies and job based training, this innovative competence management system improves on existing manual processes by providing management and reporting in an online dashboard. This allows many different types of users to access the most up to date data at the same time, fast easy and effortlessly.

This means a team can work together to record the skills of individuals and upload appropriate competence evidence. Employees themselves contribute to their competence record. This ensures a full audit of competence evidence is available alongside, live and historic data about the individual.

This data interrogation helps to prove competence, investigate gap and future needs analysis and specify recruitment requirements. Eliminating manual data analysis tasks and greatly reducing administration, unnecessary training and associated learning expenses such as travel, subsistence etc… Ultimately reducing your L&D spend.

Our competence management system supports you to ensure best use of your staff resources to enable you to provide the safe, high quality and compassionate service required by the CQC with a single click.

For more information on how you can use technology and data in your home visit careintelligence.co.uk , email support@careshield.co.uk or call us on 0345 880 1818