Editor - David Lane
Quality

THE CHILTERN COLLEGE offers a two-year full-time course studying for the CACHE Diploma in Nursery Nursing NNEB and the NVQ Level 3 in Child Care and Education and The Chiltern Certificate. Residential accommodation available on campus Entry post GCSE or A Level Students from around the world work towards a qualification giving lifetime skills in many areas of child care. NOW VISIT OUR WEBSITE www.chilterncollege.com	Over the last ten years, quality has become a matter of concern to everyone. It is important to people commissioning or purchasing services, as they need to know that they are getting value for money. It is important to managers, as they need to be reassured that the services are delivering the sort of service they claim to be offering. It is important to workers as they need the satisfaction of knowing that they are doing their jobs well. It is important to service users' families, as they want to know that the service users are getting a good service. Most of all, it is of importance to the people at the receiving end of services as they are the consumers and it affects their lives directly. Quality is therefore perhaps the one factor which is of concern to everybody. However, once you try to define quality, differences of opinion start to appear.
For a start, each of the stake-holders listed above sees quality from a different viewpoint. The service commissioner will want to be sure that the specified service is provided, but will want the service to be as cheap as possible, and won't want extra bills for service enhancements which were not agreed beforehand. The families of service users may want to be reassured of the service users' safety, while the service users might want to exercise their independence, and take a few risks. Staff might offer something to service users which they themselves consider to be special, but the service users' taste may be quite different, and they may think that the offer does not enhance the quality of their lives.
If the aim of the services is to meet service users' needs, their views have to be given prime importance. They know what it is like day by day to be on the receiving end of the services, whatever other people may say about the aims of the service. Any service which does not have a variety of mechanisms in place to find out the opinions of service users cannot claim that it places value on making the meeting of service users' needs central to its functioning. However, the views of other stake-holders are also important, and a distinction needs to be made between service users' needs and wishes. Service commissioners, for instance, have to take account of the state of the budget and equity between service users, and may need to decline to fund the wishes of some service users. In some cases, the wishes of other family members may take precedence over the wishes of a service user, in order to meet their needs. In some cases, members of staff know best, for example in needing to protect service users from harming themselves or others.		Advertisement CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND Dr. Louise A. Jackson Pub. Routledge READ OUR REVIEW

Consultation, negotiation and openness underlie the successful achievement of quality. What is meant be quality needs to be talked out, so that differences of view can be identified, understood and resolved. Misunderstandings often arise because people make assumptions that other people agree with them or have the same understanding of the situation. So it is important that people providing services, for example, get to know what service users and their families are really wanting, and if that it different from what the service commissioner is asking for or what the staff feel is in the best interests of the services users, it needs to be talked out, so that everyone knows where they stand. Hidden differences only lead to misery and damage, whether it is apparent at the time or not.

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