Managing quality assurance and continuous improvement in services

This short course will help managers produce effective responses and will demonstrate how to identify and implement service improvements.

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework sets out how health and care providers should respond to patient safety incidents, with a focus on improvement rather than blame. It encourages organisations to prioritise learning, involve those affected, and take a more proportionate, flexible approach to investigations.

This page includes specific guidance for independent care providers, charities, and adult social care services, along with templates and planning tools.

Care home audits are part of the quality assurance and improvement cycle operated by all care providers. They involve a review of the efficiency and success of local and regulated safe systems of work and practice against the proven and agreed standards for high-quality care. If you want to better understand care home audits, their benefits and how to use them properly, we have put together this guide to help steer you in the right direction.  

This interactive course provides practical tools and techniques to support creative thinking and continuous improvement in the workplace. Based on Kaizen principles, it encourages participants to challenge assumptions, generate fresh ideas, and lead meaningful change. The course also introduces structured methods for analysing processes and identifying opportunities to work more efficiently.

For those committed to delivering the highest levels of care, this module covers how you can exceed CQC expectations to achieve an ‘Outstanding’ rating.

Duty of Candour is a legal and ethical obligation that requires healthcare professionals to be open and honest with patients when things go wrong. This course will equip you with the knowledge and skills to effectively navigate situations where things don’t go as planned.

The intention of the duty of candour legislation is to ensure that providers are open and transparent with people who use services. It sets out some specific requirements providers must follow when things go wrong with care and treatment, including informing people about the incident, providing reasonable support, providing truthful information and an apology when things go wrong.

This course will give an overview of the Duty of Candour, its application, and its role in safety incidents.

This online training course will help you to understand these definitions and what you need to do to comply with the duty of candour legislation, including the recent CQC updates. It is suitable for people working at any level in social care.

Part of Skills for Care’s Good and Outstanding (GO) online toolkit, this resource supports adult social care providers to build a positive learning culture—one that actively identifies, investigates, and learns from safety incidents. Aligned with the CQC’s Single Assessment Framework and shaped by the experiences of high-performing services, it offers practical insights and real-world examples to help strengthen your approach.

Good and outstanding-rated services encourage and effectively resource the drive for improvement. From effective quality assurance practices to the ability to research and act upon innovation, these services are committed to providing the best care possible and can implement the changes needed.

This practical resource from Skills for Care is aimed at care providers looking to improve their CQC rating. It’s especially helpful for leaders and managers who want to embed continuous improvement across their service. The guide breaks things down into clear steps, with a focus on understanding what ‘good’ looks like and how to get there.

This interactive module helps managers conduct learning reviews to understand what can be learned from actions or experiences that didn’t go as planned. It explains the purpose of learning reviews, how to conduct them with individuals and teams, and how to integrate them into your work environment. The module encourages exploring different perspectives and creating action plans to avoid repeating incidents.

When staff feel safe and supported to report accidents, incidents, near misses, and errors, it creates opportunities for meaningful reflection and positive change. Taking the time to learn from what’s happened—whether things have gone well or not—helps services to become stronger, safer, and more resilient.
 
This edition of the MILE newsletter highlights a range of resources to support reflective practice, strengthen quality assurance processes, and encourage open, team-wide learning.

These short case studies highlight real issues that have happened in care settings—what went wrong, how the provider responded, and what action the CQC took. Each one ends with practical steps you can take to help prevent something similar in your own service.

This national framework sets out how health and care providers should respond to patient safety incidents, with a focus on improvement rather than blame. It encourages organisations to prioritise learning, involve those affected, and take a more proportionate, flexible approach to investigations.

Quality assurance involves the monitoring and evaluation of the service to ensure that the quality is being met. The following recommendations are aimed to supporting services to deliver effective quality assurance and evidence care that meets regulatory expectations.

This resource helps shape high quality adult social care services and improve the wellbeing of adults using social care.

It brings together our quality standards and medicines guidelines in an easy to use format, mapped against the Care Quality Commission (CQC)’s 5 key questions. We designed the resource for  people involved in commissioning adult social care. But it could also be useful to provider organisations, and people who fund their own care.

This event gave participants the chance to explore people’s experiences and perspectives about what quality means in adult social care, both now in pandemic management and recovery planning, and what quality social care means in the future.

The duty of candour requires registered providers and registered managers (known as ‘registered persons’) to act in an open and transparent way with people receiving care or treatment from them. The regulation also defines ‘notifiable safety incidents’ and specifies how registered persons must apply the duty of candour if these incidents occur.

This course will help you to think about how those involved in healthcare can monitor the progress of any initiative to improve care, and how they can make sure that any change is sustained.