Quality standards

At NCHA, we put our customers at the heart of everything we do. We know that our customers want to be involved in decisions around the care they receive, and we support them to do this.

If you're an NCHA customer, or if you support someone who is, we welcome your feedback. For the rare occasions when our service hasn't lived up to expectations, we have a thorough complaints process to help us find out where we can make improvements.

We publish a regular magazine, Voicebox, which gives the people who use our services an opportunity to tell their stories and share their experiences.

Monitoring our services

Our customers have also helped to develop the service standards which set out what customers can expect from us. We've trained and continue to support an independent group of customers to assess the quality of our services.

To help us provide good quality services, we use different ways to review what we do and to help us improve. These include:

Quality audits – checking that we do what we say we will, that we follow our policies and procedures, and looking for areas where we can improve
Quality checks – these regular checks apply to specific areas of our services and include reviews of individual cases to make sure that services meet our standards
Learning – we share best practice and what we have learned with our staff to improve our services
Comparison – we compare our performance with other organisations to look for other ways to improve our services.

British Standards Institute

Our registered care services, such as care homes and enhanced support living, are regulated and inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Other services are independently assessed and registered to the British Standards Institute (BSI) for:

Restraint reduction

Our care and support services for people with intellectual disabilities use positive behaviour support to maximise quality of life, and to promote access to community spaces and activities. We aspire to minimise the use of restraint in all forms, and are members of the Restraint Reduction Network. As part of our membership, we've committed to a series of pledges, which can be viewed in our restraint reduction plan [PDF].