Family Early Help
What is Quality Assurance and Why Do We Do It?
Quality assurance, or a deep and reflective look at our work, is a driving force that helps us make sure we're doing helpful, purposeful work that helps families, and to help us continually learn and improve our work.
Quality assurance helps us understand what works well in practice, what could be better, whether we're using all the tools and processes available to us to make the work helpful and purposeful and, most importantly, to understand whether 'the help helped'.
Auditing is one QA method. It is a collaborative, shared process between the auditor, supervisor and worker, with each having equal opportunity to reflect and contribute to the audit itself.
This partnership approach to audit is essential as it offers learning opportunities at individual, supervisory, system and organisational level, and ultimately helps us all to give the most helpful and purposeful support possible to Camden families.
Auditors should ensure they mirror Resilient Families principles and ways of working throughout the audit process.
Auditing is one part of our QA process. Family feedback forms another crucial, and arguably most important, part of our understanding of whether the 'help is helping'. You can read more about that here
We also regularly take part in joint audits with Social Work, and multi-agency audits with the Camden Childrens Safeguarding Partnership.
What Type of Audits Do We Do?
FSCF has two types of audit since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
- COVID Audit: this is a short-form audit, looking primarily at processes, procedures and recording, and touching on practice.
- RFP Audit: this is a long-form audit, looking more deeply at practice, and touching on process.
We also do:
- audit of our work with families who 'return' within 12 months of ending their work with us.
- audit of our work at front door
- audit of work with families who 'step up' from early help to social care
- thematic multi-agency and joint audits with social care and with the Camden Safeguarding Children Partnership
This section contains all the documents needed for COVID Audits and RFP Full Audits.
You can find out more about our approach to quality assurance in our Early Help Quality Assurance Framework here
COVID Short-Form Audits - Documents and Links
COVID Audit Procedure August 2020 (updated from April 2020)
Audit Form - Blended Visits (use from 3 August 2020)
Audit Form - Virtual Visits Only (use from 3 August 2020)
COVID-19 Audit form BLANK (DO NOT USE FROM 3 AUGUST 2020)
Face-to-Face Visits - Pre Visit Checklist Procedure (from 3 August 2020)
Face-to-Face Visits - Pre Visit Checklist Case Recording Procedure (from 3 August 2020)
Virtual Visits - Making Calls Procedure
Virtual Visits - Case Recording Procedure
Childrens Resilience Framework
Resilient Families Long-Form Audit - Documents and Links
RF Practice Auditors Procedure and Guide (updated Sept 2021)
Returning Families Audit Office 365 Form