1st February 2010
Lifeways Community Care has appointed a dedicated Quality Director to drive its comprehensive quality agenda.
Dorothy Delooze has taken on the role of Quality Director at Lifeways, one of the UK’s leading providers of services for people who have diverse and often complex needs. In her new role, she will lead the organisation’s strategy to delivery high quality services, an element of which will be to ensure inclusion at every level for people who use a Lifeways service. High on her list of priorities is preparing the organisation to comply fully with the new Care Quality Commission Regulations 2009. She sees this as a real opportunity to build on outcome-based service provision across the company.
Lifeways, which has 3,000 staff members, has already made good progress in driving person-centred quality service provision. It has been awarded OHSAS 18001 for occupational health and safety and ISO 9001 for quality business management. The company has also had 98 per cent of all services rated as good or excellent by the Care Quality Commission – 20 per cent higher than the national average.
Dorothy said: “We have to build on our success to date and be persistent in driving our continuous improvement agenda. It’s a very exciting time.”
Another key priority for Dorothy is making sure the company fully embraces the Government’s Personalisation agenda. To this end, Lifeways is already working with In-Control to focus on and deliver an organisation-wide approach to personalisation and Individualised Budgets.
Dorothy said: “Our year-long project with In-Control will build on what we have already achieved across the organisation. We have done and continue to do great work with some local authorities across England, Scotland and Wales. Now we need to look at our successes and apply them nationally.”
She added: “I will also be working on our inclusion strategy, looking at how we involve the 1,250 people who use our services. We need to build on our person-centred approach and help people get involved with the organisation at a local, regional and corporate level.”
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