RQIA inspection ready for domiciliary care
RQIA does not grade domiciliary agencies. It raises requirements and recommendations and expects them closed by the next inspection. homecareOS carries the minimum standards behind them, with an evidence route for all but one.
The evidence is gathered while you work
Not a compliance module you visit once a year. Four things that run continuously, from the day you switch your nation on.
Evidence assembles itself
Twenty one rules watch the records you already keep. A completed training course, a falls risk assessment, an incident closed with learning, a right to work check: each writes a link to the framework item it evidences, at the moment it is filed. Nobody tags anything, and nothing is copied into a separate folder that then drifts.
Every date an inspector asks about
Care plan reviews, risk assessment reviews and the trigger that forced them, training expiry, background check renewals, supervisions, complaint response deadlines, audits, incident investigations and goal reviews. All tracked, all chaseable, all in one overdue view.
Records that cannot be quietly tidied
A MAR entry or care note can only be corrected with a written reason, with the original kept. Medicines record taken, refused or not administered as three different clinical events, with who recorded them and when. That immutability is the thing that makes the rest of your evidence worth showing.
Your nation, not a translation
Set your nation and the whole platform follows: the right regulator on printed documents, the right registration and background check vocabulary, the right mandatory training list, and the right ethnicity classification, which genuinely differs across the four nations.
All 16 minimum standards, and evidence linked to 15 of them
the Department of Health’s Domiciliary Care Agencies Minimum Standards, across the four RQIA domains. homecareOS holds every one and applies the set that matches your nation.
Records you already keep are matched to the minimum standards they evidence as they are filed, through fourteen concepts: risk management, medicines safety, training, supervision, safe recruitment, safeguarding, infection prevention, governance and audit, complaints, person-centred planning, family involvement, people’s experience, outcomes and falls. For Northern Ireland that reaches 15 of 16, 94%.
Fifteen of the sixteen have an evidence route. The exception is the information you give service users about the agency, which is a document you write rather than a record we can derive.
RQIA issues requirements, which cite regulations, and recommendations, which cite the minimum standards, collected in a Quality Improvement Plan you must respond to. Recruitment records under Regulation 13 and Schedule 3 are the single most cited area in the reports we read, which is why staff file completeness gets the attention it does here.
What RQIA has written about other agencies
Three findings from published RQIA reports on domiciliary services, so you can check yourself against them before someone else does. Illustrations rather than a frequency table: the sample is small and weighted towards services that were struggling.
“The agency had not obtained a Declaration of Physical and Mental Fitness for staff as part of recruitment.”
“One employed staff member and three staff supplied by an external provider had been deployed with no enhanced AccessNI check in place.”
“Schedule 3 information was not complete for staff files reviewed.”
Three things to keep hold of yourself
Good software makes these easier to see and harder to forget. It does not do them for you, and an inspector will know the difference.
The record kept in the person’s home
Regulation 21(2) requires a copy of the service user plan and a record of the service provided to be kept at the service user’s home. That is a duty on you and there is no electronic exemption, so treat any “go paperless” pitch, ours included, with that in mind. We print what you need to place there.
Obtaining the checks, not just holding them
We can hold the Schedule 3 checklist item by item and flag a file that is short. Chasing the referee, interviewing the candidate and signing the fitness declaration are yours, and the declaration is a statement you make about the worker rather than a document you upload.
Who you sub-contract to
Deploying staff supplied by a provider not registered in Northern Ireland is a commercial decision no system will make for you.
What we are building next for Northern Ireland
Published so you can hold us to it, and so you know what to plan around in the meantime.
- Schedule 3 tracked item by item, so a staff file shows exactly which of the twelve items is missing
- Quality Improvement Plan responses held against the inspection that raised them, with first and second time stated correctly
- An inspection pack that prints the Schedule 4 records and the indices RQIA asks to see on the premises
- Northern Ireland is the newest of the four nations in homecareOS. Talk to us before you commit, and we will tell you plainly what is ready and what is not.
Your nation decides which framework you see
RQIA Inspection, Answered
What RQIA asks to see in Northern Ireland, and how the records support it.
See it against your own records
Start free for up to 5 carers, or book half an hour and bring the findings from your last inspection.