Firstly, thank you to everyone who completed an organisational assessment, we had over a 50% response rate which equated to 2664 responses, 94% of which were either rated 5 or 4 which means that many of you believe that, as an organisation, we are meeting or moving towards our quality objectives. The areas of “Safe working practices” (94) and “Person Centered Care” (94) were identified as our main strengths, with “Staff Morale” (90) being identified as the area where improvements could be made.

Health and Safety (94)

As an organisation, we take pride in creating a safe environment for both our residents and staff and are proud that this has been recognised.  Overall, Health and Safety was rated an almost perfect 94.  Across the three services, each of the sub-sections under Health and Safety were consistently rated 4.5 or more with the highest rating being given to “Effective Hand Hygiene” and “Infection Control and PPE”, which received an almost perfect 97.

Person Centered Care (94)

The provision of care section aims to evaluate your views on the provision of direct services to residents and this rating scored highly achieving well above our organisational target at 94 remaining the same as in 2018. As an organisation we regularly undertake customer satisfaction surveys and this section can be compared directly to the results of these surveys.

Our Philosophy of Care ensures that our residents are our main focus and we pride ourselves on delivering high quality care by ensuring everyone is treated with respect and dignity. “Safeguarding residents from abuse”, “respecting diversities”, and “person-centred care” were the most highly rated sections and seen as our key strengths. “Meeting changing needs” and “challenging behaviours” were rated lowest, although still over target, and therefore seen as areas of focus.

In response to the feedback on staff morale (more on this later) and in order to ensure all staff have the confidence to challenge behaviours that are not in line with our philosophy of care, the organisation will be conducting meetings with management and leadership teams to identify mechanisms to raise awareness and understanding of our Philosophy of Care and implement strategies to encourage and support staff to challenge behaviours.

Management (93)

The management section was designed to assess how effective the management teams are at supporting and enabling quality services. Each standard under the Management category was rated over 4.5 across all services and perfect 5s were given for communication and listening. 95 was given for supporting high quality care and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. 66% of staff also felt that the management team’s open-door policy was a key strength of the organisation whereas 45% of staff considered responsiveness to difficult situations to be a strength compared to 65% in 2018.

We will be relying on these strengths over the coming months to implement our action plan.

Staff Morale (90)

We understand that staff morale is difficult to measure, is time sensitive, and subjective so these series of standards were designed to give us some insight into areas that can have an impact on morale. In the main the feedback was that staff felt valued and supported and felt they are provided with equal opportunities as their colleagues. We were pleased that 87% or staff felt their short-term future was within the group and 70% felt the same about their long-term futures.

This outcome reflects the hard work of the management teams to maintain our family-based values and attitudes whilst we continue to grow as a group. Our whistleblowing and open-door policy support this with 96% of staff responding positively to this.

A particular area of focus identified is staff confidence to express views (89), which has not changed since 2018. We are committed to addressing this and will ensure that the management teams conduct regular team meetings with staff to provide staff with the opportunity and ensure our staff feel empowered to express their individual views and opinions.

Leadership (91)

We expect a lot from our leaders. They must be able to demonstrate that they can effectively manage a team based on its overall success of meeting expectations, provide instruction, advice and emotional and academic support to others and must actively seek to broaden relationships.

Our leadership section allowed staff to provide feedback on how effective our leaders were at meeting these expectations.

Overall the rating of 91, up from 88 in 2018, showed that across the group, although our expectations are high, our leaders are meeting this challenge head on, however, there were a number of standards that did not meet our targets, and this will be the main focus of our action plan over the coming months.

Support for personal development (94) and our leader’s commitment to their roles (91) were rated highly and seen as key factors to their success, however, it was felt that the allocation of tasks (89) was a weaker point and, similar to 2018, there was a lack of commitment by leaders to effectively promote collaboration and shared responsibility (88).

In order to ensure task allocation is clear, the organisation has developed an organisational structure which clearly lays out role definitions and the flow of information throughout the company. We will address this directly with leaders in a further series of leader’s workout sessions (LWS) over the coming months. Future sessions will include effective communication, understanding the organisational structure, and our philosophy.

These sessions will be communicated in advance and will be made open to all team leaders and managers. If you are currently working towards a team leader role then please discuss participation with your manager.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The provision of equipment (70%) is now considered to be the highest scoring strength as opposed to 2018. In 2018 provision of equipment was identified by 34% of staff to be a weakness and 53% of staff considered this to be a strength, this can therefore be identified to have seen significant improvement in 2019. This is followed by our open-door policy (66%). Similar to 2018, 61% of staff also identified organisational learning as a key organisational capability and we will be using this over the next 12 months to reinforce areas of strength and support areas that require improvement.

Organisational communication was identified by 34% of staff as requiring improvement and by 30% of staff as an area of strength.

With this inconsistency in mind we have taken steps to open direct channels of communication with leaders to ensure information is transferred quickly and effectively. Our training days also allow us to communicate directly with staff and bring staff from all services together to share information.

The other area that stood out as requiring improvement is our social media presence with 45% of staff highlighting this. To understand this better, a focus group is to be established to develop staff awareness of our social media platforms, our policies and procedures and to discuss and highlight potential actions with the purpose to improve our online presence.