We all know the importance of having effective audits in place to check the quality of the service and to ensure that procedures and processes are being followed, but how do you ensure compliance if you have a remote role or oversee several services? In this blog, I look at what mechanisms and tools you can put into place to ensure that compliance remains regardless of whether you are in the building or not.

Firstly, you should be able to ensure the quality of your service from anywhere. We live in a digital era where tools allow us to review dashboards and actions. Some simple and quick wins to ensure that are in place are:

• Clear policies and procedures and that staff have read and understood and/or know where to find them.
• Robust governance systems that assess, monitor, and drive improvement in service quality and safety. Digital solutions like Audit On Cloud by InvictIQ can assist with this. Their AI-powered Quality Assurance Dashboard also identifies gaps and areas for improvement in specific Key Questions or Quality Statements, enabling quality monitoring even from remote locations.
• Regular feedback from people who use your care service, their representatives, staff and other stakeholders. The comms/feedback module of Audit On Cloud simplifies remote feedback management by enabling you to easily collect and analyse input from all stakeholders. Feedback can be initiated remotely via links or QR codes shared through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. The collected data is automatically compiled and analysed, providing actionable insights effortlessly.
• Continuous improvement from feedback is implemented.
• Lessons learnt are shared.
• Robust monitoring and auditing processes.
• Teamwork – it is vital that you build strong relationships with your team that is built on trust and transparency so that they feel able to report incidences and non-compliance.

To ensure compliance when you are not within the service, you should ensure you look to embed:

Tech enabled solutions

Make the most out of technology to be able to monitor and communication in real-time. Some technology I find useful is:

• Microsoft Teams / WhatsApp / Slack – to be able to communicate with my teams on a daily basis, either via messages or video calls.
• Audit on Cloud – a digital solution by InvictIQ, enables supervisors to monitor quality and compliance even remotely. By centralising all actions, evidence, and reports in the cloud, it ensures a single source of truth that is easily retrievable. With real-time data insights, supervisors can effectively track compliance and quality, ensuring your care business is always compliance-ready.
• Microsoft To Do – is a great tool to create to do lists that you can share with others.
• Trello – is a great project management tool to use within small to medium sized teams.
• E-Signatures are a great way to ensure that you do not need to be in the building to sign documents.

Check-Ins

Check-ins are a fantastic way to be in contact with your team and I would aim to schedule these at least once a week, allowing you to discuss compliance, challenges the team are facing, any issues they have encountered and to provide feedback.

KPIs

We need to move away from KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are used to try and drive performance but have a negative impact on motivation, to a model where they can be used to track compliance such as incident rates, training completion, response time to enquiries, number of reviews completed in homecare services etc. It is importance to monitor these metrics remotely and address deviations.

Risk Assess

Risk assessments are often discussed when it comes to the people we support, staff returning from sick leave, maternity leave etc, but often not around compliance and business performance. It is important that you and your team identify high-risk areas and possible blind spots and then prioritise audits and mechanisms to reduce these and ideally prevent them.

Remote auditing

Just because you are not on site, there is no reason why you cannot complete remote audits or spot checks on your service. Here are some ideas:

• Use video calls to observe care delivery.
• Spot check audits to ensure they are thorough, and actions have been addressed.
• Turn up in person and undertake a spot check/audit of what is happening.
• Conduct virtual interviews/meetings with staff and those you support to gather their feedback.
• Request electronic versions of care plans/care notes etc so you can check the quality.

Remember, it is important to share the feedback of what you have found, both positive and negative.

Analyse data

It is important that you analyse data trends to identify patterns. Some systems will be able to utilise artificial intelligence to do this for you, but older systems will need you to extract that data and manually perform this task.

Automation

Utilise digital systems to automate some of your technology. I have systems in place where I am alerted if someone puts onto the system a complaint and/or safeguarding notification. These allow me to ensure that they are being investigated, processes followed etc