A Leeds-based community care charity has praised its staff after being rated ‘good’ across 54 services by the Care Quality Commission.
St Anne’s Community Services, which covers Yorkshire and the north of England, deemed the results a “real-achievement” for all their 1,500 members of staff.
The group provides a helping-hand for people with learning disabilities, mental health problems, who are homeless, or suffer from drug and alcohol issues. Services include a variety of housing and accommodation-based support, day services and community-based aid.
Susie Maguire, director of operations, quality and safety at St Anne’s, said: “It’s important to be able to demonstrate that the care our staff are giving to our clients is good.
“I’m inspired on a daily basis when I go around services and see what’s happening, and hear stories from managers about the incredible work.
“All of us together have been completely focused on driving up quality and everything else that’s involved in delivering services that are good or better.
“For us to get the recognition from an external body, that’s a national body as well, it demonstrates to our commissioners that actually the services are really good.
“We are funded by public money, the local authority and the CCGs, so to demonstrate to them that they’re getting value for money as well is a real positive.”
The positive results follow St Anne’s recruitment of a quality team two years ago, which focused on driving up the standards of the service’s systems, processes and policies by working hand-in-hand with management.
“We’ve done an awful lot of work on policies. We’ve brought experts in to support us as well when we’ve needed to do, and I think it’s just been a drive to change and to enable us all to get that good rating,” said Susie.
“The whole team has completely contributed to the scores, and when I say the whole team, I mean the whole organisation. All our managers without exception have embraced this and have shown their commitment.”
St Anne’s aren’t about to rest on their achievement, and are already looking at what lies ahead.
Susie added: “We are really pleased that we’ve got good in all our services at the moment, and we want to maintain that.
“We know that will be a challenge, but we also want to achieve outstanding in some of our services, so we are just going to continue to do what we are doing.
“We are going to focus on some of our areas where we think we could improve to get that next level of outstanding, and do more work that involves our clients. I think that will enhance our current work.”
