Amy Coleman Completes Managers Essentials Training

In mid-June, Amy Coleman, our Registered Manager, spent three days at Right at Home’s National Office in Waterloo, Merseyside, for the network’s Managers Essential Standards programme – an intensive course covering leadership, compliance, and governance, delivered to Registered Managers and senior staff from Right at Home offices across the country.

It would be easy to file this under “internal business news” and move on.

We think it deserves more attention than that, because the quality of the training behind a care service shapes the quality of the care itself.

What a manager learns in a training room in Merseyside shows up, sooner than you might expect, in a client’s living room in Clapham.

Here is what the three days covered, and why they matter.

The first day focused on leadership, culture, and emotional intelligence, built around a distinction that shaped the whole programme: management is about tasks, while leadership is about people.

 Management keeps a service compliant: rotas, audits, policies, and performance monitoring.

Leadership creates the environment in which people want to do their best work, rather than merely completing what is required of them.

The day explored transformational leadership in depth: leading by example, building a shared sense of purpose, encouraging ideas, and coaching each team member as an individual.

It covered the psychology of motivation – people perform at their best when they feel trusted, capable, and connected – and the value of a growth mindset, in which mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn rather than reasons for blame.

Perhaps the most important theme was psychological safety: building a culture in which staff feel safe to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and raise concerns without fear.

The safest care services are not the ones that never experience problems.

They are the ones where concerns surface quickly, are discussed openly, and lead to genuine learning.

As the trainers put it, culture is what people experience when nobody is watching, and leaders shape that culture every day, through their behaviour far more than their paperwork.

Day two turned to the regulatory and legal foundations of care: the CQC’s Fundamental Standards, and the framework of regulations that governs everything from person-centred care and dignity to consent, safe treatment, safeguarding, and good governance.

These can sound like abstractions, but each one is a concrete protection wrapped around every person receiving care.

A substantial part of the day was devoted to the Mental Capacity Act, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in care.

Its five principles begin with a presumption of capacity: every adult is assumed able to make their own decisions unless proven otherwise, and people retain the right to make decisions others might consider unwise.

Capacity is specific to each decision and each moment in time, and any decision made on someone’s behalf must be in their best interests and as unrestrictive as possible.

The day also covered care planning and positive risk-taking: the principle that a care plan is a live document built around the person’s wishes, preferences, and goals, and that the aim of risk assessment is not to eliminate all risk from a person’s life, but to support them to live as fully and independently as safely possible.

That balance of safety and freedom sits at the heart of dignified care.

The final day tackled governance and inspection readiness under the CQC’s Single Assessment Framework, and it carried one central message: it is not enough to say what a service does, you must be able to evidence it.

Inspectors are less interested in polished policies than in proof of what actually happens: how feedback is gathered, how concerns are handled, how lessons are learned, and how improvements are measured.

The practical content was extensive.

Weekly medication audits rather than monthly backlogs, so that small discrepancies are caught early.

Regular audits of client files and staff files.

Rigorous checks on recruitment, DBS status, and, a detail many providers overlook, proper business-use insurance for every Carer who drives.

Structured management meetings with minutes, actions, and follow-through.

Case studies that capture positive outcomes, not only problems.

Underneath the detail sat a philosophy we share: governance as a continuous cycle of evidence, learning, improvement, and re-evaluation.

The strongest services are not those that never make mistakes.

They are those that find issues early, respond constructively, and demonstrably improve.

That is what “well-led” means in practice, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to between inspections, not just in preparation for them.

Training of this depth is difficult for a standalone care provider to deliver.

This is one of the quiet advantages of being part of the Right at Home network: a large, experienced, and consistently high-quality national family of local offices, with a National Office that invests properly in developing the people who lead its services.

The benefits go well beyond the course content.

Alongside structured programmes like Managers Essentials Standards, the network provides a dedicated compliance team, audit and governance support, inspection preparation, and out-of-hours advice – an infrastructure of expertise standing behind every local office.

And the three days in Waterloo were also three days spent alongside Registered Managers and senior staff from Right at Home offices across the country, swapping ideas, comparing approaches, and building relationships that continue long after the training ends.

Good ideas travel fast in a network like this.

Just as importantly, we do not see development as something reserved for managers.

We want to make opportunities like this available to others across our team too, so they can grow in their roles, build their confidence, and make their own connections across the network.

Investing in our people is not an overhead – it is precisely how the care we provide keeps getting better.