The Care Commission

The Care Commission regulates care services throughout Scotland. These include childminders, care homes for older people and fostering services.

Its inspectors – Care Commission Officers (CCOs) – write around 10,000 reports a year on the services they inspect.

The organisation strongly believes its public documents should be as clear and understandable to the general public, who use care services, as to the experts who run the services.

We developed and ran 20 inspection report-writing courses for CCOs, and five courses specific to senior managers and directors.

We strongly feel that part of our role is to hand over skills to our clients. So we’ve also worked with members of the organisation’s communications team, who also have plain English qualifications, on training skills. They have maintained the plain language momentum after we finished our courses.

We have continued to work with the Care Commission on occasion as editors of some of their specialist reports ensuring that the reports produced are appropriate to the wide audiences for whom the organisation’s reports are so important.