Lucy Pilliner, Business Manager at Katherine Harriet Ltd Looking at the 6 c’s in Health & Social Care
What are the 6c’s of social care? And how do we at Katherine Harriet incorporate this into everything we do.
For those of you who are unsure what the 6c’s are all about, the 6c’s of social care is an underlying concept that is central to the Compassion in Practise Strategy, set up by the NHS in 2012. People may sometimes refer to the 6 c’s of health and social care as the six care values.
The idea behind Compassion in Practice was to combat some big challenges in health and social care settings, where levels of care and behaviours of providers fell way short of service users’ and the public’s base expectations.
The 6 c’s of health and social care are a set of common values that should underpin the delivery of high-quality care and create consistency across the sector. Adopting and embodying the 6 c’s of social care by individual providers and the sector as a whole, helps to ensure that people being cared for are always the priority. But what are the 6 c’s in health and social care?
Care
Our priority as a care provider is to offer and ultimately deliver a 100% quality care. We always strive to improve care standards on both an organisational and individual level. We strive to provide impeccable care and ultimately the right care for the clients we care for, they rely on us to ensure they have a better quality of life.
People’s expectations and requirements for care will change at different stages of their lives, so it is crucial that Katherine Harriet, and our staff, all recognise this and adapt to our clients changing wants and needs.
Communication
Central to the effectiveness of teamwork and relationship building, communication is how we talk and listen, as well how we record information to help retain and store all information. This extends to keeping clear, accurate and up to date records on the clients we care for and ensuring relevant information is shared with the right people.
It is important that Katherine Harriet adapts a listening culture, ensuring we are taking in to account the ideas and opinions of staff, our clients, and other professional bodies. Ensuring that all our clients are listened to and encouraged to speak up, this is especially important to us and in maintaining a person-centred care and approach.
Compassion
Our relationships are built through compassion to help deliver personal care to our clients. Compassion in care requires respecting the personal positions and requirements of our clients and their needs. Our clients need to genuinely perceive that they are being cared for correctly, this can only be achieved through empathy and dignity.
“Treating people as people may sound simple, but in the often demanding and stressful work of delivering care this can be overlooked or forgotten.”
Katherine Harriet and all staff providing care must remember to treat our clients with understanding, patience, empathy, and consideration. Always seeing them as a unique, individual person and never as a simple consumer or number in the system.
Courage
Courage in social care has several applications. Courage to make difficult decisions, or to do and say the right thing when the time requires it. Acting on and raising any concerns over safety or wellbeing internally and if necessary, externally. Courage can also mean being open to changes and improvements when new innovation arises to improve our care quality or safety.
Competence
Having the right staff in our care organisation with the knowledge, abilities, and skills to carry out their role in a way that ensures care quality, safety, and compassion.
Competence refers to skills and knowledge acquired by experience and training, which are typically assessed and evaluated. But it also refers to having all the necessary knowledge and understanding of everything relevant about the client we are giving care to.
This can include the persons’ mental and emotional health, their physical condition and their personal tastes and needs. Having a combination of the skills, abilities and knowledge of our clients is required to deliver the highest standards of care.
Of course, what constitutes competence varies by role and will change as our staff move through their care career.
For us as managers we also make big decisions about our client’s care, competence can include having knowledge of the latest methods, research, and approaches to social care, that will help us make the best possible decisions, this also has a positive impact on the care we deliver
Teaching new processes and a culture that is focused on competence, learning and improvement can help ensure staff at all levels have the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to deliver the highest quality care.
Commitment
A passion to care for our clients, wanting to always improve and deliver the highest quality care possible.
We all should have this commitment, from care workers to managers and business owners. Katherine Harriet is committed, to improving wherever possible and to deliver the best care and support across our services.
