What is excellence?
Parkhaven Trust provides homes for over 100 people: different homes for different people and different needs. There are currently 6 homes which are part of Parkhaven Trust. They all meet different needs. There is a small home for people with significant additional needs, another home in the community for people with learning disabilities, a specialist residential home for people with dementia and a nursing home generally for older people. What they all have in common is that they have been assessed by the regulator of health and social care, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) http://www.cqc.org.uk/ as excellent. Our Kyffin Taylor home for people with dementia has joined the ranks of our excellent services.
Currently in order to be assessed as a 3 star excellent service by CQC, the expectation of the service is ‘not for perfect services but for particularly good services, well managed and with a sustained track record of high performance’ (CSCI, QPM Document no 167/07). Interestingly they must have resorted to the dictionary for this description because it describes excellence as the ‘quality of excelling, or being exceptionally good’ (Collins English dictionary).
It is my belief that excellence needs to be constantly worked at. There is absolutely no room for let up and there is always room to do things better. In the experience of the service user everything we do is important. The Trust is launching a new strategy, CHOICES, in which we identify excellence as a crucial plank of what we want to achieve over the coming 5 years. Service users will be the test of whether we are successful in that endeavour over
the coming years. But we are not resting on our laurels , a new service is just being developed. Work started last week on our next new project, an extra care housing scheme for older people. We will track its progress through this blog.
Hilary Rowland
8.10.09
Parkhaven Trust provides homes for over 100 people: different homes for different people and different needs. There are currently 6 homes which are part of Parkhaven Trust. They all meet different needs. There is a small home for people with significant additional needs, another home in the community for people with learning disabilities, a specialist residential home for people with dementia and a nursing home generally for older people. What they all have in common is that they have been assessed by the regulator of health and social care, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) http://www.cqc.org.uk/ as excellent. Our Kyffin Taylor home for people with dementia has joined the ranks of our excellent services.
Currently in order to be assessed as a 3 star excellent service by CQC, the expectation of the service is ‘not for perfect services but for particularly good services, well managed and with a sustained track record of high performance’ (CSCI, QPM Document no 167/07). Interestingly they must have resorted to the dictionary for this description because it describes excellence as the ‘quality of excelling, or being exceptionally good’ (Collins English dictionary).
It is my belief that excellence needs to be constantly worked at. There is absolutely no room for let up and there is always room to do things better. In the experience of the service user everything we do is important. The Trust is launching a new strategy, CHOICES, in which we identify excellence as a crucial plank of what we want to achieve over the coming 5 years. Service users will be the test of whether we are successful in that endeavour over
the coming years. But we are not resting on our laurels , a new service is just being developed. Work started last week on our next new project, an extra care housing scheme for older people. We will track its progress through this blog.Hilary Rowland
8.10.09
