We are a group of Care Homes employing care professionals at our sites. We pride ourselves with ensuring that we offer the best quality of care to our service users and a large part of this is the quality and professionalism of our staff.

Making sure our staff are trained and up-to-date is often quite a challenge. A lot of what we do is learning ‘on the job’ by shadowing or working alongside more experienced colleagues. We offer e-learning modules and bring in external companies to deliver practical and ‘classroom’ training for our colleagues. Some of the training is mandatory and is part of a requirements from CQC but we always strive to be better than just the minimum.

Other challenges are around managing health and safety and ensuring we’ve the correct training in place for everyone who needs it. With so much training and development needed, it’s difficult to keep on top of it. It’s all to easy to miss someone who has training that’s expired or fail to identify a gap in training for someone else.

From time to time we need to bring in agency staff to help out when we’re short staffed. This comes with it’s own set of challenges. How do we know that the agency staff have at least achieved the minimum requirements of the CQC? Do they have any other skills that we know our own staff would have? Also, are they trained to the same levels of safety compliance that our own staff are?

• Record all of the training and qualifications for our employees.
• Produce a skills or competency matrix by location or department.
• Identify expired training or skills gaps.
• Demonstrate that everyone is up to date with the correct legislation.
• Record competencies of agency staff who work on our sites.