Useful Information
Duty of Candour
Duty of Candour
Duty of Candour is a legal requirement to ensure that if something goes wrong in health or social care services, the people affected are offered an explanation, an apology and an assurance that staff will learn from the error. The learning is shared with the people affected and throughout Scotland.
About our organisation
This report describes how a medium sized supported living provider has implemented Duty of Candour throughout the period of April 2023 to March 2024.
Bluebird Care supports many people to live in their own individual homes with a small team of supporters who are matched to work for the person and provide bespoke, flexible and tailored support that meets their individual needs.
Bluebird Care has a Duty of Candour policy and staff guidance. All staff undertake training to help them understand the Organisation’s policy and the process of the Duty of Candour which could affect them.
The people we work for have a variety of support needs; the majority have dementia or other life limiting illnesses.
Incident reporting
All health and social care services in Scotland must provide an annual duty of candour report for their service. As a supported living provider this information is sent to our regulator the Care Inspectorate.
During the reporting period, NO incidents triggered the Duty of Candour.
Type of unexpected or unintended incident | No. of times this happened |
Someone has died | 0 |
Someone has permanently less bodily, sensory, motor, physiologic or intellectual functions | 0 |
Someone’s treatment has increased because of harm | 0 |
The structure of someone’s body changes because of harm | 0 |
Someone’s life expectancy becomes shorter because of harm | 0 |
Type of unexpected or unintended incident | No. of times this happened |
Someone’s sensory, motor or intellectual functions is impaired for 28 days or more | 0 |
Someone experienced pain or psychological harm for 28 days or more | 0 |
A person needed health treatment in order to prevent them dying | 0 |
A person needing health treatment in order to prevent other injuries | 0 |
Procedure
In all incidents we commit to the following procedure:
- We inform the people affected, apologise to them and arranged to meet with them.
- Internally senior staff reflect on the events, identify where systems went wrong and what could we do better.
- This information is shared with all our staff through our team meetings and in support and development.
Should the person be deemed to lack capacity or had no family or advocate to formally apologise to, we utilise alternative forms of communication including the use of pictures to help this person understand the incident and ensuing procedure.
The family of the other person would met with our named person and together we share information and make positive suggestions for staff learning which we incorporate.
Our Policy and Process
When an incident occurs that necessitates the implementation of Duty of Candour, our staff reports this to their line manager and to the Senior Manager who oversees the service we provide. The incident is recorded, and the named staff member completes the Care Inspectorate reporting e-form.
The internal reporting form highlights the learning needed as a result of the incident and any specific staff team learning necessary.
Our external confidential, employee counselling service is available to all staff at any time but if Duty of Candour is triggered it is emphasised to staff that this is available. Senior management meet with staff to provide support and emphasise this is about learning and improving not blame.
Duty of Candour is part of our Core training which all staff have to undertake, in addition to the legislation a series of scenarios form part of the training to emphasise to staff that while it is distressing when things go wrong, we can and do learn from our mistakes and adapt our processes to try to minimise the events recurring. This is also included in our whistleblowing policy and values training.
Where the incident arises from staff wrongdoing, our disciplinary process is immediately put in place.
