Dear Shelia, it appears difficult to ascertain ‘Regulations’ hours a Registered Manager should work as full time hours to satisfy CQC regs. Any observations please? Thank you in anticipation.

Answered by Sheila Scott

Dear David,

As the Registered Manager the number of hours you work is a matter for you to decide.

CQC is not prescriptive about the hours that must be worked, but they will need to be sure that you are working enough hours to be able to carry out your duties.

Your employer will also have a view on this and you may well have contractual obligations.

You will also be aware of the 48 hour working time directive.

I know that there are some Registered Managers that work part time.

I suspect that your question though may relate to the number of hours you may feel you have to work to comply with your regulatory obligations. If this is the case, you need to have some discussion with your employer. You may need some administrative support. You have the legal responsibility for ensuring that your service is compliant with the law, but that does not mean that you cannot delegate responsibilities to other senior members of staff.

An example is auditing if you work in a care home. Audits have to be done to ensure that standards are being maintained, but it doesn’t have to be done by just one person.

Some examples are:

• The Handling of Medication. Put someone else in charge but be sure that you see their audits and that if there is a failure that the appropriate action is taken to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

• Health and Safety. If you have the appropriate audit forms and a maintenance person, they can do a regular audits and identify any areas where action needs to be taken. This can be reported back to you or a senior member of staff can do it.

There are a great many audits that need to be done, you need to see the outcome of the audit and take any required action, but the work can be shared.

It is the same with care plans. You are not the only person able to review the care plans. Other care workers could be regularly reviewing the contents for you.

If I have misunderstood your question, please come back to me.

Best wishes.

Sheila