As a care provider/manager, we understand you have many hats to wear and many legal and regulatory obligations to various bodies, to ensure your service remains legal and compliant, including CQC, (Care Quality Commission), HSE, (Health & Safety Executive) IPC, (Infection Prevention) and LA’s (Local Authorities).
You can download a copy of our new ‘Industry Essential Requirements and Best Practice Servicing Guide’ helping to ensure all of your essential patient care equipment servicing is up to date and you are compliant with LOLER and PUWER regulations.
Under Regulation 15 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 Regulations – Premises and Equipment you have a duty to ensure that equipment that’s used to deliver care and treatment in your service is clean, suitable for the intended purpose, maintained, stored securely and used properly.
It’s important to note that as the registered provider you retain legal responsibility under these regulations when you delegate responsibility through contracts or legal agreements to a third party, independent supplier, professional, supply chain or contractor.
You must therefore make sure that you meet the regulation, as responsibility for any shortfall rests with you.
That’s why it’s so important to choose experienced, reputable and reliable servicing partners to take care of your essential patient care equipment for you.
So what should you be looking for in a hoist inspection/servicing partner?
1) Location, location location! – ideally, your chosen servicing partner needs to be locally based, or at least have a field service engineer based within an hour of your home, to ensure you get a responsive service in emergencies.
2) They employ ‘competent people’ to carry out your examinations – according to the LOLER Approved Code of Practice, who have appropriate practical and theoretical knowledge and experience of the lifting equipment to enable them to detect defects or weaknesses and to assess their importance in relation to the safety and continued use of the lifting equipment.’
3) Their staff are DBS checked and fully vaccinated (with NHS Covid pass letter) for the safety and security of your residents and staff.
4) Engineers are trained in infection prevention and work to a strict hygiene regime for your safety.
5) A dedicated engineer for your home who gets to know your equipment, your staff, and who you can trust and build a relationship with.
6) They are proven to be reliable – they arrive on time at the prearranged time consistently.
7) Their engineers have full working knowledge of LOLER, PUWER and CQC regulations and legislation, and can provide evidence of regularly attending relevant training courses relating to the equipment to be inspected and serviced to ensure you remain compliant consistently.
8) Service inspections are carried out with a view to how the equipment needs to perform over the next 6 months, and be maintained Any long term potential issues should to be highlighted in the servicing report and clearly communicated to the care home management team.
9) Verified customer reviews – do your research and check out what their existing customers are saying about them on Google, Trust Pilot or Feefo.
10) Quality of documentation – ask for examples of certificates and documentation you will receive on completing of inspections to check how thorough their checks will be.
11) How much time they allocate to your equipment inspection will give you an indication of how ‘thorough’ their examination is.
12) They have an office based support team who can help you with any queries and requests for copies of paperwork.
13) They offer a same day call out service for emergency breakdowns.
14) Their engineers don’t work on commission – to ensure you get honest and unbiassed reporting.
15) They operate a proactive Maintenance Scheduling service booking in all of your LOLER inspections so you don’t have to worry about remembering and always remain compliant.
16) You can gain easy access to full service history of your equipment for when you need it.
17) The chosen company has a policy of carrying regularly used spare parts as van stock allowing a smooth and efficient flow of the servicing and repairs on initial visit to keep any downtime to a bare minimum to keep your care homes fully functional wherever possible.
In summary, We know that care businesses with regularly serviced and well-maintained patient care equipment result in:
- Improved quality of care
- Improved quality of life for your residents
- Reduced risk of accidents
- Improved CQC ratings
- Increased occupancy
- Improved resident and family satisfaction
- Saving of valuable staff time
- Reduced equipment replacement costs
If you would like to learn more about how Hcsuk Servicing could help you to create a safer care environment, why not download our latest guide here or call and speak to Lee, our Servicing Coordinator, for a no obligation chat, today on 01773 532588.
And you can sign up for our latest ‘ Servicing Partner Checklist’, helping you to check the credentials of your servicing company AND demonstrate due diligence to CQC.
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