Duty of Candour Policy

Aim

The aim of this policy is to ensure that Cavendish Homecare Professionals is fully compliant with the Duty of Candour and embraces a culture of openness and truthfulness in all of its dealings with clients, their representatives and our workforce.

In accordance with the Care Quality Commission’s Quality Statement Safe: Learning Culture, we have a proactive and positive culture of safety based on openness and honesty, in which concerns about safety are listened to, safety events are investigated and reported thoroughly and lessons learned to continually identify and embed good practices.

What is the Duty of Candour?

The Duty of Candour requires social care providers to be open and transparent with clients about their care and treatment.

The Francis Inquiry proposed that providers should be under a statutory Duty of Candour to inform the client, or other duly authorised persons as soon as practicable, when they believe or suspect that treatment or care provided has caused death or serious injury.

Implementation

Cavendish Homecare Professionals fully supports a culture of openness and transparency in all of its dealings with clients and their relatives or representatives. We believe that promoting a culture of openness and truthfulness is a prerequisite to providing safe, quality care. The organisation has a well-developed framework for incident reporting to which all staff must comply.

The following applies to Cavendish Homecare Professionals:

Managers and staff are expected to develop and maintain an open, transparent, candid and honest working culture at all levels and at all times.
The culture of honesty and transparency includes clients, their carers, relatives and representatives and staff.
Clients will be informed in a timely manner if incidents have occurred.
Managers will provide a truthful account of the incident and details about the associated enquiry and investigation.
A sincere apology will be offered in writing wherever appropriate.
Managers and staff will be expected to provide all reasonable support and assistance to those involved after any incident.
All untoward incidents, errors and accidents must be reported as soon as they occur and appropriate records maintained including details regarding any investigations.
A thorough and open investigation will be conducted into any incident, accident or mistake where a client suffers moderate or severe harm or may have suffered such harm but for a near miss.
Clients, their families, carers and representatives will be assured that lessons learnt from the incident will be used to help prevent the recurrence of such an event.
The default position is to be open, honest and candid, unless there are justifiable reasons for not being so – for example, if the client affected actively says that they do not want further information about the incident.