While most care homes in the UK do an excellent job in taking care of our elderly people, there are still too many horror stories involving some wretched treatment of residents.
Now, a new annual survey for the care home industry aims to deliver a national benchmark for quality. The poll is being managed by Ipsos Mori and it will canvas care home residents for their views on their own establishments when it comes to the things which really matter to them such as food, security, staff, organized activities, privacy, outdoor amenities and general levels of satisfaction and happiness.
So far, over 850 homes have signed up to the programme so the organisers are hoping initially to hear the opinions of some 46,000 residents. The plan is to use the results to establish a quality mark provisionally to be called the “Your Care Rating.”
At the moment, many care home management groups conduct their own internal customer satisfaction surveys but there is nothing to help prospective residents decide where to go in the same way as say hotels and guest houses are graded.
All too often, decisions about which home to choose are made in times of crisis and it is hoped that the quality mark system will help people to quickly sort the wheat from any chaff that might exist in their catchment area.
Signing up to the scheme is, of course, entirely voluntary and it is reasonable to assume that any establishment which isn’t confident about its likely results will shy away from participation. This means that the very places which would get doubtful results will not feature and will therefore not benefit from any future quality mark.
Either way, this sounds like a promising way of helping future care home residents make confident choices about where they go and should serve to raise standards across the industry. After all, if any home doesn’t join the scheme and get any kind of quality mark, people are bound to ask what they have to be shy about.
The homes that do participate in the programme will obviously benefit from the feedback the surveys provide and from having national benchmarks against which to measure themselves.
This is a bold initiative which fully deserves to be supported and it is hoped that the current 20 % of non-local authority homes who are signed up to the scheme are gradually joined by enough of the others to provide a meaningful guide for prospective new residents.
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