Recently I met with the Care Inspectorate in the Scottish Parliament to discuss care issues across the Kingdom. The Inspectorate is the official body responsible for inspecting standards of care in Scotland.

Over 14,000 care services are registered with the Care Inspectorate, including care homes, childminders, day care centres and support services which includes care at home. The inspection regime looks at quality of care and support, staffing and management and leadership.

Recent figures from the Inspectorate have found that across Scotland the number of care homes with unsatisfactory or weak grades has increased. However, services in Fife have improved, with now over 95% achieving grades of adequate or better.

It is vital that the standard of care in Scotland is at the highest quality and organisations such as the Care Inspectorate have an important part to play in achieving this.

There has been a small increase in the number of care homes receiving negative grades and this should be concerning to all. However, the vast majority of care homes are passing inspections, some with high grading’s.

We should be striving for all care homes to be fully satisfactory to offer peace of mind to users and their relatives. We have previously seen instances of poor practice and to ensure that this doesn’t happen again it is important we have a robust inspection regime.

Fife, though, has seen an increase in the number of services that have received positive grades and this should be recognised, with everyone involved from staff to management rightly praised.