Standards in Regulating Quality of Adult Community Health and Social Care: Systematic Narrative Review

Abstract

The growing range and complexity of community care services requires robust approaches to ensuring quality. Method: This review collated studies on the use of standards in regulating community health and social care using Social Care Online, Medline and CINAHL databases. Studies were appraised by two reviewers, and synthesised by study themes. Results: Sixteen studies were synthesised under three themes:• standards in quality assurance and quality improvement;• effectiveness of standards; and • design of regulatory standards. Standards facilitate providers in self-regulation, and enable regulators to support and monitor improvement. Effectiveness of standards depends on their language and interpretation, and on organisational factors. There was little evidence of scales within quality standards. Discussion: There is continuing debate about self-regulation versus external regulation. Social care service regulation requires more research. Conclusion: Regulatory organisations should take note of wider initiatives towards evidence-based practice in the design of quality standards.

Definitions of health and social care standards used internationally: A narrative review

“…The evolution of standards stems from the quest for patient safety and quality improvement in hospital care 42 . Standards play an important role in quality assurance and quality improvements when used as a component of inspection practices 43 . This may explain why ‘quality’ is the most commonly used term among the definitions.…”

“…(2020) who wrote a review in the context of Northern Ireland and examined how standards and quality measures are used to regulate health and social care services. Findings suggested that standards would be more effective if based on measurable lived experiences from service‐users and care outcomes 43 . However, it is noteworthy that the term ‘outcome’ is not used in the definitions of standards extracted from standard‐setting bodies in England and Northern Ireland.…”

Impact of smart health systems on the behavior of older adults under community healthcare

“…The data results of the survey are based on the 365 questionnaires collected, which may lead to biased conclusions; and personal thinking is not comprehensive enough, which may also affect the quality of research. As a path study on the development of grass-roots community health service centers under the background of population aging, if time and samples are sufficient, I think this paper has more room for further discussion ( 30 ).…”

Developing scaled tools for residential and nursing home inspection: feasibility study

“…The outcomes from these Working Group sessions were taken to Workshops comprising all of the 20 nurses and social workers of the Care Homes Team (whose role is the inspection of residential and nursing homes), as well as appropriate managers. These sessions were informed by published literature (Chen and Grabowski, 2015; Cunningham et al , 2020; Kim et al , 2009) and by quantitative information on risk factors from an audit of the organisation's administrative data.…”

“…This presents challenges, particularly in community health and social care services (Smithson et al , 2018, p. 35). One promising approach is to build on the expertise of inspectors by creating scaled inspection tools to supplement or give structure to the conventional narrative record of inspection findings as reported in a recent literature review which has been used to inform this project (Cunningham et al , 2020). That review by Cunningham et al , using robust search methods, identified the limitations of the existing knowledge base on the topic.…”