Assuring the Quality of Assessment and Care Management

This Case Study sets out how a large social services department has been developing a strategy to assure the quality of its assessment and care management service. It draws on familiar concepts within the field of quality assurance and applies them directly to the exchanges that take place between the practitioner and the client. It is designed to open up the opportunity for managers to secure proactively improvements in quality of practice that go beyond managing the environment of practice, working conditions, or the organisational processes. The paper also looks at the process of seeking to build the strategy into the department's main stream of operational management.