The 6C’s categorised by the NHS are:
- Care
- Compassion
- Competence
- Communication
- Courage
- Commitment
1. Care
The priority for any care provider should be the care they offer and ultimately deliver. Each organisation should always strive to improve care standards on both an organisational and individual level. Care is always expected and required to be right for the people being cared for, who rely on these services to have a better quality of life.
People’s expectations and requirements for care will change at different stages of their lives, so it is crucial that organisations providing care, and the people working in them, all recognise this and adapt to people’s changing wants and needs.
2. Communication
Central to the effectiveness of teamwork and relationship building, communication is how as a community we talk and listen, as well as how we record information to help retain and store anything important. This extends to keeping clear, accurate and up-to-date records on the people, we care for and ensuring relevant information is shared with the right people.
It is important any care organisation adapts a listening culture, ensuring they are taking into account the ideas and opinions of staff, people using care services and local stakeholders. Ensuring that people being cared for are listened to and encouraged to speak up is especially important in maintaining person-centered care.
3. Compassion
Relationships should be built through compassion to help deliver personal care to the recipients. Compassion in care requires respecting the personal positions and requirements an individual might need. Care receivers need to genuinely perceive that they are being cared correctly for, which can only be achieved through empathy and dignity.
Treating people as people may sound simple, but in the often demanding and stressful work of delivering care, this can be overlooked or forgotten. Organisations and individuals providing care must remember to treat people using care services with understanding, patience, empathy, and consideration. Always see them as unique, individual person and never as simple consumer or numbers in the system.
4. Courage
Courage in social care has several applications. Courage to make difficult decisions, or to do and say the right thing when the time requires it—acting on and raising any concerns over safety or wellbeing internally and if necessary, externally. Courage can also mean being open to changes and improvements when new innovations arise to improve care quality or safety.
5. Competence
Having the right people in your care organisation with the knowledge, abilities, and skills to carry out their role in a way that ensures care quality, safety, and compassion.
Competence refers to skills and knowledge acquired by experience and training, which are typically assessed and evaluated. But it also refers to having all the necessary knowledge and understanding of everything relevant about the person and persons they are giving care to.
This can include the person's mental and emotional health, physical condition and personal tastes and needs. Having a combination of the skills, abilities and knowledge of the individual is required to deliver the highest standards of care.
Of course, what constitutes competence varies by role and will change as people move through their care careers.
For managers or others making bigger decisions about a person’s care, competence can include having knowledge of the latest methods, research and approaches to social care, that will help them make the best possible decisions, to have a positive impact on that person’s care.
Embedding processes and a culture that is focused on competence, learning and improvement can help ensure everyone at all levels of your care organisation has the necessary skills, knowledge and abilities to deliver the highest quality care.
6. Commitment
A drive to care for those who need it the most, wanting to always improve and deliver the highest quality care possible.
Everyone working in care should have this commitment, from care workers to managers and business owners. This commitment, to improving wherever possible and to delivering the best care and support possible should be applied across a care service and crucially at the level of each individual using that care service.
An example of commitment includes attending regular training sessions and committing to your own personal development to ensure the level of care provided is consistently at the highest standard. Professionals can also show commitment by dedicating themselves to improving the patient experience, whether that’s through individual care or the overall organisation.
How the 6 c’s underpin the Compassion in Practice strategy
The 6 c’s underpin the compassion in practice strategy, which aims to:
- Help people to stay independent, maximising well-being and improving health outcomes.
- Work with people to provide a positive experience of care.
- Deliver high-quality care and measure the impact of care.
- Build and strengthen leadership.
- Ensure care settings have the right staff, with the right skills, in the right place.
- Support positive staff experience.
Adopting the 6 c’s ensures these aims are continuously strived towards in health and social care settings.
How the 6 c’s affect social care providers
To maximise well-being within social care settings, care providers need to consider how they are delivering care and managing their staff. The NHS ‘Compassion in Practice’ strategy states different actions that providers should be undertaking. Firstly, it is important to emphasise that every contact with a care recipient counts and maximising the time and effort to ensure quality care is received is key to the long-term health of the individual.
Ensuring that actions are taken to improve the support offered to care staff will help their own health and wellbeing, helping the overall morale in every organisation. Recruitment and retention is a topic we have covered before, but showing that you actually care for staff wellbeing and development will help both these aspects.
What’s more, the 6’cs of social care can be used as an easy reference point, to help screen candidates, as to whether they have the right values to work in care. Values-based recruitment has been proven to be more effective than
Policy writing is crucial to show compliance with a regulator. By having an easy-to-use software solution that supports this, you can ensure your staff will have less burden reading and agreeing to the new policy.
Creating and maintaining policies and procedures is essential and tough, requiring lots of expertise in many areas and a great deal of time to make them in the first place, and then keep them up to date with the latest regulation and legislation. is a solution that makes this easy and optimal. It provides you with what you need to ensure regulatory compliance. With complete care policies and procedures for social care, with easy visibility on which staff have agreed to particular role relevant policies.
Embody the 6 C’s of social care from top to bottom
Foster a culture that embodies the 6 c’s of social care at every level, from new recruits to managers and owners, and within your processes, for example how you handle complaints, how you respond to incidents, manage clients’ records and so on.
Recruit and do your best to keep the staff that both understand and can live up to the values in the 6 C’s of social care.
Combine these two elements of culture and people, and each element will begin to reinforce the other. People will hold up the caring culture and the culture will help them to do the right thing. This will help you develop into a care organisation that delivers the highest quality of care service almost by default.
