Outstanding Innovation
The Outstanding Society, a group open to any care service rated by CQC as Outstanding, hosted a meeting earlier this month with guest speaker Wendy Mitchell, author of bestseller ‘Someone I Used to Know’. Wendy spoke about her experience of early onset dementia and how care providers and professionals could best enable people with dementia.
Wendy Mitchell says: “I arrived to find a room full of warm compassionate people, whose sole aim is to provide the best possible care. It was both informative and, at times, a revelation with regards to the challenges they face. Their willingness to listen and learn felt very genuine and their hugs and concern appreciated”.
The Outstanding Society aims to identify ways of disseminating outstanding best practice to colleagues in the social care sector. The Society is supported by Care England and Skills for Care. There are approximately 556 Outstanding care homes in England. Providers strive to be outstanding but the concept of ‘outstanding’ varies and more uniformity is necessary in order that all inspectors can support, challenge and recognise the individual innovations in different services. At the most recent meeting there was general agreement that social care needed to be depoliticised with a long term strategy in place.
Delegates heard from a range of speakers including Camilla Trimble: Founder of the Outstanding Society, Avnish Goyal: Chair of Care England, Jeremy Hughes: Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, Alex Ramamurthy, Chief Executive of the Care Workers’ Charity and Kate Terroni, Chief Inspector at CQC.
Kate Terroni, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care, at the Care Quality Commission says: “As Chief Inspector of Adult Social care at the CQC I value the opportunity to work with the Outstanding Society to observe first-hand how good and outstanding providers are continually striving to improve and provide the best quality care, as well as being open with sharing best practice and listening to others. In our Driving Improvement report published in June 2018 we highlighted nine services which had significantly improved and are providing person-centred care, but we also welcome the feedback from providers about how we work as a regulator, what is working with our inspection processes and what can be improved. We value our relationship with the Outstanding Society which allows us to work together to build a better future for adult social care.”
Reflecting on the event’s proceedings, Chair of the Outstanding Society, Camilla Trimble says: “This conference was one of our best with some inspirational and thought provoking speakers. It was good to see so many providers networking, engaging and sharing their ideas”.
