Every resident in your home moves through 3 kinds of day. There is the 8 hours or so of rest at night, watched over by sensors and call systems.
There is care: the medication rounds, the personal care, the clinical observations, all logged in your records platform.
And there is the rest of it: the 8 to 10 waking hours where someone has a conversation, joins a singalong, sits by the window, refuses lunch, laughs at something on the television.
These are the living hours.
Two of those kinds of day are covered by mature, structured technology. You can:
- prove, to the minute, what medication a resident took at 8am
- show their care plan
- store their risk assessments
- prove that night-time checks were done
But the living hours have had almost nothing. They usually run from a paper diary, a coordinator’s memory and are preserved in a folder stuffed full of photographs.
For years that did not matter much, because nobody inspected it closely. But that is changing.
Single Assessment Framework
The Single Assessment Framework that arrived in 2024 looks hard at what residents actually experience, day to day, and the new Chief Inspector of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) Chris Badger has been clear that observation now leads the inspection.
The living hours are no longer the soft part of the visit. They are increasingly the part that decides the rating.
Here is the uncomfortable position that leaves a good home in. Your team almost certainly does this work well. The warmth is real, the activities happen, the residents have good days.
But when the CQC inspector asks you to show it, you reach for the same paper diary and folder of photographs that every home has.
They prove something happened. Not that it mattered, not to whom, not whether anyone noticed the resident who was quietly slipping.
That is the gap. Not a gap in care, a gap in evidence. The care is real. The record of it is not.
Evidence gap: the defining problem in care
We think this is the defining problem in care quality for the next few years, and it is a solvable one. The good days your team already runs can leave a structured trail, the same way medication and care already do, without anyone writing a single extra report.
The point is not to do more.
It is to make the good that already happens visible, before someone asks you to prove it.
That is the whole reason More Days Studio exists.
If your next inspection is on the horizon and the living hours are the part you are least able to evidence, you are not behind.
You are where almost every good home is right now.
The homes that move first will simply have the proof ready when the question comes.
If you want to see how Studio can work in your home, let's have a chat: 20 minutes, no pressure, just your living hours and how to evidence them.
— 485 words · Inspection and evidence