Care Certificate Assessors

Happy Sixth Birthday, Care Certificate!

So here we are, April 2021, six years on and the Care Certificate is still going strong…  and yet it would seem that assessing the Care Certificate still has some of the same challenges.  We have blogged about some of these recently:

https://greymatterlearning.co.uk/blog/care-certificate

https://greymatterlearning.co.uk/blog/care-certificate-assessing

I am not planning to go over what I talked about in those posts; feel free to have a read using the links above, plus there is much more here:

https://greymatterlearning.co.uk/care-certificate

This week, I wanted to focus on one particular topic, assessing competence for the Care Certificate, partly because this week sees the release of our newest free course on exactly that subject and partly because, during the quality assurance process that all of our courses are subject to, it reminded me of conversations I have had with providers over the many years we’ve been supporting the sector…

The Care Certificate has all this extra stuff in it, where we have to do the observations!

Well… it is true that the Care Certificate has 49 observable outcomes and you cannot get the Care Certificate without the “real work activities” and the corresponding observations.

But, if you have seen the Skills for Care Mandatory Training Guidance, it is really clear that for the 19 mandatory courses, you need to:

Assess knowledge and competence at least annually…

So all that “extra stuff” (according to Skills for Care) is the same as what is required for the 19 mandatory courses.

Even though our new course is called “Assessing Competence for the Care Certificate”, you can use the principles contained within it for all the courses, with all your staff, all the time.

Think of it this way… (I am always happy to have this conversation in person any time)

During the normal course of your work, managing your setting, do you carry out “spot checks” or “quality audits”?  Every single time I ask that question that resounding answer is always YES!

So, if you are doing spot checks on a regular basis and you are following the Skills for Care guidance to assess competence as part of those spot checks, then you will naturally (assuming you have a system to support you) be building competence portfolios for all of your staff.

Therefore if you can evidence that all of your staff are competent, you can share that with CQC…

This means you don’t need to send everyone on the same course year in year out.  Imagine how much time and money you could save, as well as raising staff morale and motivation.