I’ve never been fully comfortable running the Returning to Good workshop. Harmony is built on systems that generate evidence continuously — as a byproduct of good work, not as something you produce for the day someone asks. I didn’t want the workshop to feel like a tick-box exercise, because CQC itself isn’t about tick-boxes any more.
But here’s the thing I had to get straight with myself: it isn’t one.
You’re not creating evidence in the room. You’re judging the evidence you already have, through the eyes of a CQC inspector, and then building your systems around the riskiest things you find. That’s not paperwork for paperwork’s sake. That’s the honest work of finding out where you actually stand.
We track how people feel through the day — a “how do you feel right now” check at the start, and a closing word cloud at the end. The pattern is always the same. Nervous at the start. Worse in the middle, as the list of things you’re not as good as you thought you were keeps growing. Better by the end, because by then you’ve got a plan you can work through over a couple of months, not a vague sense of dread you’re carrying around indefinitely.
I think of it as the monster under the bed. It’s scariest before you’re brave enough to look. Scarier still once you’ve started looking and it’s bigger than you expected. And far smaller once you’ve actually seen it properly and worked out what to do about it. I’d much rather you were shocked in a workshop, with me in the room, than shocked sitting across from an inspector.
On 7 September, one cohort came through with only one or two greens on their self-assessment. Almost everything else was amber. Very few reds. People are genuinely shocked at what they find — not because their practice is in a bad place, but because most practices have never sat down and looked, properly, at where they actually stand against what an inspector would check.
That’s the whole point of the workshop. Not to hand you a badge. To hand you a plan.
Join the free Harmony CQC community, or if you’re ready to build the system properly, sign up for the workshop today.
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