Background to quality improvement in social care

Quality matters in care services.

Care audit is a means to showcase excellence across the sector, to identify unmet needs or unacceptable variations in care, and to drive improvement where necessary.

With a shift towards achieving high-quality outcomes for people who use services and an increasing focus on value for money, there is an urgent need for these goals to be supported by high-quality intelligence and information systems.

Care audit is aligned with the expectations and requirements of government policy including departmental aims around personalisation, dignity, integration of health and social care, end of life care and dementia strategies as well as the requirements of statutory regulation.

The benefits of care audit – care audit can help to:

• Work in partnership with people who use services to prioritise local concerns
• Provide a check for care providers i.e. “are we actually doing what we think we are doing?”
• Implement and sustain improvements in services
• Provide evidence of current practice against national guidelines
• Provide evidence about the quality of care in a service to establish confidence among stakeholders
• Deliver a return on investment