Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is the responsibility of all who work at Uplands Enterprise Trust (UET) and dependent on role we become accountable for the decisions we make.

Quality for UET is about assuring that there is effective service delivery that ‘helps young people and adults with additional needs to help themselves’.

Our mission is to be an exceptional and unique organisation that builds self-belief and confidence to ensure young people and adults with additional needs live a rich and meaningful life.

Our Quality Assurance Framework aims to provide a range of mechanisms to help set direction, support delivery, manage risk, monitor and review practice and outcomes and ensure that our stated priorities are being met, ensuring that the voice of the young person or adult using the service is heard.

The overall aim of this framework is to:

Ensure that practice is high quality, effective, accountable and evidenced
Measure the impact of what we do on individuals and their families
Drive a programme of continuous improvement by
- Engaging with and listening to our young people, staff and partners
- Ensure the learning from quality assurance activities contribute to service improvement
Meet national and local requirements
Place the young person or adult at the centre of everything we do

UET will base its quality framework on the five key questions of the Care Quality Commission:

Safe	Working with people to understand what being safe means to them as well as with our partners on the best way to achieve this. Looking to improve people’s lives while protecting their rights to live in safety, free form bullying, harassment, abuse, discrimination, avoidable harm and neglect, and making sure concerns are raised quickly and appropriately.
Well-Led	Well-led looks at the culture, strategy, values and governance of the service. How leaders and managers work to ensure the organisation continues to improve, engaging with others to deliver the best service possible.
Responsive	Looks at person-centred care and support, including support planning and helping people to maintain relationships, interests and personal goals. It also looks at how the service shares information and communicates, and how it responds to concerns and complaints.
Caring	Caring looks at how services develop positive relationships by involving people in their care and support, providing high and consistent levels of kindness and compassion and treating them with dignity and respect.
Effective	Effective means supporting people to achieve good outcomes and have the best quality of life possible., aligning care and support to evidence-based practice and ensuring that teams support people to remain as healthy as possible and delivering seamless care and support having sought people’s consent.

Our external quality assurance is from various bodies, Local Authority reviews, feedback from our Young People and Adults, parent and carers, and staff in regard to the quality of the offer they receive, and what it is like to work for UET, these are reviewed by the Head of Service, Head of HR and Head of Business and in order to identify what’s working well and areas for improvement.

The Heads of Service, Business & HR report to the quarterly Trustee Board meetings where quality assurance and good governance is evaluated.