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A care home operations manual drafted from how your home is registered, staffed and run

An operations manual is the document a new deputy manager reads in their first week and an inspector asks to see. It sets out how the home runs: who is in charge on each shift, how care plans are made and reviewed, what happens when a resident falls or becomes unwell at night, who notifies the regulator, and what to do when the heating fails. It has to describe your home, not a home.

Name it a care home operations manual and INKFLOW works from guidance written for that document, alongside its wider guidance for health and social care policies. It asks for the details a manual depends on, from your registration category and regulated activities to your health contacts, safeguarding route and fire evacuation method, and for your nation's regulator: CQC in England, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, CIW in Wales or RQIA in Northern Ireland.

Where something is missing, the manual holds a marked placeholder instead of an invented contact or rule. Clinical chapters are a draft for your clinical approver, and the whole manual is for your registered manager to approve. Responsibility for the care described stays with the provider and its registered professionals. INKFLOW is independent of the NHS and of every regulator.

Start a care home manual

Assembling a care home operations manual

  1. 1
    Start with registration
    Your registration tells the writer what the manual must cover: the regulated activities, the number of beds, the units and the resident groups. A home with nursing needs chapters a residential home does not.
  2. 2
    Add the people and the rotas
    Structure chart, registered manager, nominated individual, on-call arrangements, staffing by shift and the dependency tool you use.
  3. 3
    Attach the policies you already have
    Your existing policies and SOP list, so the manual cross-refers to them and does not contradict them. If medicines are covered by a separate SOP, say so.
  4. 4
    Approve and date it
    The registered manager approves the manual and a clinician approves the clinical chapters. Set the version and review date, and revise it when the service changes.

What the care home manual guidance covers

Care planning and consent
Assessment and care plan tools, how often plans are reviewed, and how consent and mental capacity are recorded.
Falls, deterioration and end of life
Post-fall steps using the equipment you actually have, real GP and out-of-hours contacts, ReSPECT where you use it, and the routes for expected and unexpected deaths.
Safeguarding and restrictive practice
Your local authority route and internal lead, and the checks around bed rails, sensors, locked doors and deprivation of liberty, with the least restrictive option considered first.
Notifications to the regulator
Who sends them, for which events and how, so the incident chapter does not stop at telling the manager.
When things fail
The fire procedure and evacuation method, and business continuity for power, water, heating, staffing and IT.

Where a care home operations manual meets inspection

In England, CQC looks at whether a service is safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. An operations manual does not earn a rating on its own, but it is evidence of how the home is run, and gaps in the manual often mirror gaps in practice.

The manual describes your arrangements. It cannot create them. If the brief reveals that something is not yet in place, such as a business continuity plan for a failed boiler, the draft marks it and the home has to put it right.

Questions

Will it make our home CQC compliant?
No document can. The manual describes your arrangements and helps you show them to an inspector; compliance depends on what happens in the home every shift.
We are in Wales. Does it still work?
Yes. Name your nation in the brief so the draft refers to CIW and the rules in Wales rather than England's, then have your manager check the references.
Can it write a separate medicines policy?
Yes, as its own document. The medicines management SOP page describes it.
Can it update the manual we already use?
Yes. Upload your current manual to be revised, with a note of what has changed in the home.
Can residents and families read an easier version?
Plain English and Easy Read versions exist for the parts residents and their families need to read.
Do prices include VAT?
Prices include any VAT; nothing is added at checkout.
We are an organisation. How can we pay?
Single orders are paid by card at checkout. For subscriptions and repeat orders, care homes, councils and businesses can ask about paying by Direct Debit or standing order at app.inkflowstudio.org/organisations.

More from INKFLOW

Clinical SOPs and NHS-style policiesA medicines management SOP and controlled drugs procedureAn AI writer for nurses: ward night-shift handbooksUpload your document. We review itComplete books and seriesEverything INKFLOW writes

Describe your home. We will draft the manual.

Tell us what it is for, and it is written to the standard. In the free sample, any figure that must come from your own material is left as a marked placeholder.

Start a care home manual