How to be Outstanding Every Day?

How can you and your team be outstanding every day?

A good starting point is the why.

You and your team should want to be outstanding every day – not just for CQC inspections, but because that's what you want people using your service to experience.

Yes, you’re accountable to CQC, and their reports are important. But the real key to being outstanding every day is staff who passionately deliver outstanding care every day, because they want to.

So, what about the how? Let’s look at the characteristics of outstanding services, and a few practical ways to get there.

The characteristics of outstanding care services and a few practical ways

There is a culture of continuous learning and improvement

Reflective practice should be part of your culture, a normal routine thing for staff to do. One way to embed this is by using a simple five-step reflection in team meetings and supervisions:

What happened?
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What have we learned?
What are we going to do differently next time?

Use this regularly and consistently in structured sessions, and soon you’ll notice it becoming part of your informal, everyday conversations too. Then you've made part of the culture of your service.

Quality assurance drives quality improvement. Managers check quality in many ways: audits, checklists, observations are just a few. Every time you check the quality of your service, make sure there's an action to improve the quality.

There is a coaching culture

Get in the habit of answering questions from your staff with questions: “What do you think would work?”; “How could you find out more about that?” This frees your staff to use their initiative, and they'll soon start coming to you with ideas and answers rather than problems. Coaching grows confidence.

Innovation and creativity are commonly used to achieve impactful outcomes

Try out new ideas. They won't all work – but some will, and those wins are what matter. When something doesn’t work, reflect on why, and try again. That’s how improvement happens.

Get your staff into the habit of recording not just what they did but what it achieved, the outcome. Say one of your staff supported somebody to have breakfast. Great, we need to know that, but what made it a good experience for that person? Has the staff member promoted independence? How are they giving the person choice and control?

Give people and staff influence and control

Talk to people who use your service and staff about your plans and ideas. Ask open questions like:

“How can we do this even better?’

’How can we make this work?’

And crucially, act on the feedback. Be visible about it:

You said……we did.

There is strong, visible leadership with a clear vision

We live in changing times. A service that was outstanding a couple of years ago but is operating in the same way today may not be outstanding anymore. It might not even be good. Do you know where your service needs to be in 18 months? Do you know what your staff will need to be doing differently? Do your staff know, and do they believe in your plans to get them there? Skills for Care’s Leadership programmes are a great way to learn how to be a visible leader with a clear vision.

There’s a deep understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion

Are all your staff confident in challenging discrimination? Do your staff see diversity and representation in managers and leaders? If not, do they believe in your plans to address this?

Can you empower staff from underrepresented backgrounds in other ways? Can you empower them to champion for areas of care such as dignity?

Does your equality, diversity and inclusion training include real-life scenarios? Are scenarios discussed at team meetings?

They are role models for other providers

Be outward facing. Join Skills for Care Registered Manager forums. Share what you are proud of. Talk about what’s working.

Learn from outstanding services. Every month, review a recent CQC report for a service rated as outstanding. Ask yourself: what did they do? What practices which made them outstanding do you want to adopt?

Embrace the CQC Quality Statements

The quality statements are standards you need to be working to, so don't leave them with CQC. Make them your own. Embed them wherever you set standards internally: policies and procedures, care plans, goal set for staff in supervision or team meetings, training outcomes and job descriptions.

Review your practices and make plans to be not good but outstanding in relation to each quality statement. You could use our action plan below. We’ve included an example:

Consider all the CQC evidence categories:

People’s experiences
Feedback from staff and leaders
Observations of care
Feedback from partners
Processes
Outcomes of care

Prepare for a CQC Inspection

Key question: Are they responsive to people’s needs?

RESPONSIVE: The service meets people’s needs.

Quality statement: Equity in experiences and outcomes.

We actively seek out and listen to information about people who are most likely to experience inequality in experience or outcomes. We tailor the care, support and treatment in response to this.

Where we are now:

Our awareness of who is at risk of exclusion is anecdotal. We need it to be evidence-based so we can be certain no one is less likely to use our service because of personal characteristics or their social circumstances.

Actions:

Deputy Manager to contact Healthwatch, commissioners, and local GP surgeries by end of April
Compare our service uptake data with wider community demographics
Create an action plan based on the findings

Where we are now:

We have 7 people who are Hindu using our services. Due to cognitive impairment, they are not able to give us direct feedback. Their family members are not involved in their care.

Action:

Manager to find a paid expert by experience with lived experience of Hindu faith and cognitive impairment
By end of May, this expert will attend a staff meeting
A best practice guide will be co-developed within one week, and used to quality assure care for Hindu service users

You and your team can be outstanding every day

Being outstanding isn’t a finish line you cross. It’s a mindset, a commitment, and a culture. And it’s something you can achieve—when your team believes in it, owns it, and builds it into everything they do.