Care Governance

West Berkshire Council have a Care Quality Team. Whose role is to work with providers of adult social care services to:

• Offer challenge, support,information and guidance to improve the quality of service being delivered.
• Monitor and respond to intelligence that may indicate that there is a problem with service delivery, for example CQ1’s, Care Quality Commission reports, whistleblowers, complaints, safeguarding alerts, information from other agencies/Local Authorities.
• Work closely with colleagues across West Berkshire Council’s Social Care Service, Health and external agencies e.g. The Care Quality Commission to share information.
• Share good practice and create networking opportunities.

Please see leaflet with further information including contact details.

Wokingham Borough Council have a Care Governance Protocol in place.

Within Reading the Council’s Commissioning team  there is a small Provider Quality Monitoring team who monitor the quality of services provided to the people of Reading, which are commissioned on Readings behalf, or services directly provided by the Council.

The quality team work closely with Providers who are registered with CQC, other local authorities, and Health partners to gather and share information about the quality of services.

Where there are significant concerns which the Provider is failing to address and where improvements are necessary for the welfare and safety of service users, the team will call a multi -disciplinary meeting of all relevant interested parties, with the Provider present, to discuss those Care concerns. This will usually be chaired by an Assistant Director. If these significant concerns include safeguarding matters , the multi-disciplinary meeting will include a safeguarding representative and will again be chaired by an Assistant Director.

Such meetings may result in considerations of whether the Provider should be flagged “Amber” or “Red”. Flagging will impose restrictions on their use by Reading and will be communicated to other agencies who commission services from that Provider. Any warning flags imposed will only be removed once the Provider has satisfied the quality team that improvements have been carried out and are being sustained and any safeguarding matters have been resolved.

The Quality Team has close links with the Home Care Support Team who work with Providers to build skills, knowledge and confidence in the vital work they do to improve the wellbeing and care of residents .

The team also work closely with safeguarding staff in enquiries in relation to safeguarding in care settings. They carry out quality monitoring visits to Provider services pro-actively and re-actively arranging scheduled and unannounced visits to Providers when concerns are raised or when there rating by CQC is down graded following inspection by the regulator.

The primary function is to help Providers improve their delivery of care services and provide the highest standards of care to service users and their families in Reading.

The team can be contacted via QPM@Reading.gov.uk

Have a care quality function in place, the Board are awaiting this information. Please refer to Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West, Integrated Care Board Website.