The Care Certificate will be six years old next month; I remember the launch like it was yesterday. How things have moved on since April 2015!
The Care Certificate has its critics and its champions; I like to think that we fall into the champion category. I know that in recent articles following COVID and the spotlight on social care in recent months, some of the Care Certificate’s critics have called for standardised approaches to induction and various other versions of the same thing.
Care Certificate Champion
But, as an organisation which has believed in the Care Certificate from the very beginning, we must point out to those critics that a standardised version of induction already exists and it is called the Care Certificate. I remember exactly where I was on the 1st of April 2015; in a room full of managers delivering a workshop on the Care Certificate, using our website at the time CareCertificate.co.uk.
Now, I was only reminded this week that the Care Certificate has some challenges, BUT (and it is a big but), we have been working on those challenges for six years now and we do have some, if not all, of the Care Certificate answers. That is what I want to share this week, alongside some of the things we are working on to address the issues we are going to talk about next week.
Certificate, not a qualification!
The Care Certificate is not a qualification, a fact which its critics have regularly bemoaned. However, as a champion, I disagree with them; it should be (exactly as it is) Employer Led, so that you can shape the Care Certificate to meet the needs of the people you support. The Care Certificate should prepare you and for the apprenticeship or Level 2, at the same time preparing you for your job role, with the people YOU support. If it was a qualification, it would have to be standardised across every provider (social care or qualifications) which would decrease its power.
Six years on
Six years on and some of the sector is still facing the same challenges they were in 2015. If that includes you, have a read of a new case study from Digital Social Care about one of our customers, Dimensions, and how we have supported them to overcome the challenges I am going to share in the remainder of this series.
Care Certificate Portability
The Care Certificate is only portable if the quality of the learning and the portfolio meets the outcomes in the Standards. From the many conversations I have had over the years, unfortunately, that quality varies. The other challenge I hear is the quality of the TRAINING varies which is why we wrote “the Care Certificate is not about training” a few months back alongside “Competence is more important than attendance”.
We need to find ways to have a different conversation about training and the Care Certificate, along the lines of another post we wrote some time ago “Learning vs Training”.
Start with WHY…
That conversation needs to start with why – thank you Simon Sinek – I get it. Why do we do the training? We “do” the training so that our staff can learn and then apply that learning in their practice BECAUSE it impacts on the lives of the people we support, which is the real WHY. We do the training because CQC Regulation 18 includes the principle of competence and the Key Question that CQC are going to focus on in the new transition monitoring approach is: is the service SAFE? – not is the service “in date” or “trained”, but SAFE.
Whilst our customers love the Training Matrix in Click, we don’t do the training just to turn the Training Matrix green…
Next week I am going to cover:
Care Certificate Self Assessment
Care Certificate Assessors
Care Certificate Assessment
If you want to know more about how we do the Care Certificate, just give us a call…
