3.3 How can people using services be supported to participate in quality assurance in long-term care?
Quality standards may request that service providers involve people who use services and their carers and families in the planning and development of their services as well as delivery. Involvement is embedded throughout the quality frameworks that have been developed to support implementation of national standards.
There has been an improvement across Europe in the involvement of people using services in quality assurance and feedback mechanisms, be it through satisfaction surveys or procedures to raise any issues or complaints. This is also facilitated by ombudspersons and regular inspections where users are able to express their preferences and expectations, or ad-hoc inspections in case of complaints.
Regulatory inspections of care providers’ compliance with national standards may also include specific requests to assess users involvement, such as:
• •
Respondents to the ESN questionnaire reported on initiatives to involve people suing services and their families in:
• •
•
• •
t he design of care services (as illustrated in the example from Aviles, Spain), the assessment of the quality of care or services (as we saw in the example of the care quality standards framework in Scotland, UK), participation in functioning of residential care facilities (see the example below of Participation for Quality Assurance in Practice).
pre-inspection questionnaires sent to care services for them to distribute to families, relatives, and service users, online questionnaires implemented within care homes, interviews with service users, families and relatives, and visitors, anonymised comments within inspection reports to reflect people’s views.
Figure 10 provides an overview of mechanisms reported in the questionnaires to help ensure user participation in delivery of long-term care.
Figure 10 Involving users in quality assurance
0%
20%
40%
60%
Regular control visits
(Anonymous) telephone Ombudsperson Other
Source: ESN Survey, Q29 (multiple answers allowed).
52
80%
100%
