A Registered Manager logs in on Monday morning. Waiting there: three months of audit findings, a survey with 62 replies, the complaints log, and the action plan from the last inspection. Count it all up and you get 40-odd things that could fairly be called a priority.
This is where a care quality improvement platform earns its place or doesn’t. It can’t choose for you. What it can do is put your own records side by side, so the decision rests on evidence and not on whoever spoke last in the meeting.
What follows is one way to pick three priorities for a quarter. It’s a working method, not a regulatory requirement. And it can be adapted to any service.
Why “most urgent” is a poor test
Safety issues are the exception. Fix those the same day, outside any planning process.
For everything else, ranking by urgency tends to reward volume. The loud problem gets the meeting time. The quiet one, say an audit gap that turns up every third week, never reaches the top of the list, even though it may touch more people over a year.
A more useful question: could you show, in twelve weeks, that something changed? That depends on whether you have a starting point today, and whether the problem sits within your control.
Regulation 17 leans the same way. The CQC guidance says providers must have systems and processes such as regular audits, and must “assess, monitor and improve the quality and safety of the service”. An improvement you can’t measure is hard to show against that wording. The full text is on the CQC website.
Start with what keeps coming back
A finding that appears once is an event. One that shows up in six of the last twelve weekly audits is a pattern. Usually, it means an earlier fix dealt with the symptom.
Three questions will find these:
- Which audit questions have failed more than once this quarter?
- Which actions were closed, then raised again within a few weeks?
- Which unit or shift keeps appearing?
Take the last one seriously. A pattern in one-unit points towards people, layout or rota. A pattern in every unit point towards the process itself, and the fix is different.
InvictIQ shows trends and hotspots across teams in one view, so you can see where a finding is concentrated. Getting the same job done on spreadsheets, and you will lose an afternoon. That cost is partly why repeat findings go unnoticed for so long.
Then listen, and check who you are hearing
Your second priority should come from service users, families and Support Workers. Surveys pick up what audits miss, because an audit only checks what you decided to look for.
Two traps here, both to do with bias.
One is the loudest voice. A single detailed complaint can feel bigger than twelve short comments saying the same thing quietly. Count before you decide. InvictIQ includes AI analysis of sentiment and themes in free-text feedback, which helps when the volume is large. Your team still decides what a theme means, and a person should read a sample of the comments behind it. The other is who replied. If most responses come from families of service users who are already content, the result tells you little about everyone else. Look at response numbers by unit first.
Then test the theme against your own records. Families say evenings feel rushed. Do your audits, or your call-bell records, say anything similar? If yes, you have a strong priority. If no, that is useful too. It may mean you are measuring the wrong thing.
The one you can’t measure yet
Most improvement advice says to pick measurable goals only. Let’s push back on that for the third priority.
Some of the things that matter most have no data behind them, handovers for instance. Or how consistently new Support Workers are shown the same task. Or how well families hear about a change in care. Nobody audits these, so they never reach a priority list. They are missing from the evidence, not from the problem.
Make your third priority one of them. Step one isn’t fixing it. Step one is measuring it: a short handover audit added to the schedule, or two extra questions in the family survey. After a quarter you’ll have a baseline, and the next priority can be built on facts.
One consequence: this priority won’t show improvement at the first review. That is expected. What you can show is that you now hold data where you held none.
Writing a priority so someone else can check it
“Improve medication safety” can’t be reviewed. A reviewable priority has a starting point, a target, a date and a name.
Here is an invented example, for illustration only:
Priority: Reduce repeated gaps in as-needed medicines recording on the East Unit.
Starting point: 6 of the last 12 weekly audits found a gap.
Target: No more than 1 in 12 by the end of the quarter.
Owner: Senior Support Worker, East Unit. Reviewed monthly by the Registered Manager.
Read this in three months and you will know whether it worked – so will an inspector.
Keeping priorities apart from routine actions
A loose window latch is an action. It has an owner and a date, and it shouldn’t compete with a quarterly priority for attention.
The priority sits above those actions as a theme. Under each one, set a handful of assigned actions that move it forward. On your care quality improvement platform, the Quality Improvement module turns findings and survey results into actions with owners and deadlines and escalates the ones that stall. The practical point is simple. A priority whose actions have no owner won’t move, however well it’s written.
If you run several services
One pattern worth trying: a single shared priority for the whole group, plus two local ones per service. The shared one might be structural, such as how quickly audit actions are closed. Management Team can then compare services on one measure, and each Registered Manager still works on what their own data shows.
The review
At the end of the quarter, ask three things. Did the number move? Did the actions get done? Did anything unexpected turn up?
You are allowed to decide a priority was the wrong one. If the data showed the issue was smaller than it felt, drop it and write down why. A service that retires a priority with a clear reason is showing the sort of review good governance looks for.
Choosing is the hard part
A care quality improvement platform can show the pattern, keep actions moving and store the evidence. Deciding what matters to the people you support stays with you. Three priorities, each with a starting point, an owner and a review date, give you something definite to work on.
Pick three you can prove later. The rest can wait for next quarter.
