PUTTING PEOPLE AT THE HEART OF COMMUNITY CARE
The PERCCI (pronounced ‘Percy’) allows care providers and the people they support to understand the quality of care and how it is being experienced.
It is based on rigorous University research and evidence, and evaluates three established principles of person-centred care:
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understanding the person
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involving people in decisions about their care
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building positive care relationships
The tool asks 12 simple questions – designed in full partnership with people with experience of using care services.
It scores their answers in a way that will describe overall quality, but can also help to identify people whose care may be falling below expectations.
As always, there is a dilemma that one faces when asking carers to administer the evaluative tool. I can imagine that it would be great to use this tool in care homes, for example, but know, from experience, just how challenging it would be for residents to answer with anything other than really positive responses if this was being administered by care givers. It might be more useful for external evaluators if they were to be independent of the care giving staff but again this would be difficult to manage, and is miles away from co-production. I would like to think there will be opportunities for it to be used in the delivery of home based care though and wondered if you had thought of ways of managing the challenge of practitioners asking for feedback on their own practice?
I fully agree with Lesley that asking care staff to complete this with residents would be challenging. The reason it was posted was not because it is a tool to facilitate co-production, but because the questions were co-produced. It was developed in adult day services. From my experience of local authority quality assurance, the questionnaire might be used by social workers undertaking a review or by contract monitoring officers as part of their quality assurance work. Family carers could also complete it with residents in care homes.
I think this is the eternal dilemma, we want to find out if services are meeting needs, but to do this often use surveys and questions, which comes with the imbalance of power and is at risk of falling out of the remit of coproduction values.