I’ve spent a lot of my career reading policies, writing them, reviewing them, implementing them and just as much time checking whether people have read them. And, probably more times than I care to admit, watching them sit untouched in a folder while everyone carries on doing what they think they’re supposed to be doing.

Which makes me wonder, when did we decide that making a policy longer somehow made it better?

I was talking about this recently with Lucy Buxton on The Care Intelligence Revolution podcast, so when she described her first reaction to policies as “overwhelm”, it really struck a chord.

Because that is exactly the problem.

Policies are supposed to give us clarity. They are supposed to protect people, guide staff and help us make the right decisions when something happens. Yet for many people working in care, the thought of finding the right policy can create the complete opposite reaction.

And I can remember exactly what that felt like myself.

I joined social care at 17. I had no care experience, very little life experience and was still living at home with my parents.. Within my first few days, I was handed folders full of policies and procedures and expected to read them, understand them and sign them off.

Even now, I look back and wonder how anybody genuinely expected a 17-year-old to retain all of that information.

The problem is, we haven't really moved that far away from it. We've created enormous documents because, over time, more and more has been added. A regulator asks for something, guidance changes, a framework introduces another expectation and a provider adds another section. Before long, what started as a useful document has become 50, 60 or even 100 pages long.

Technically, everything is in there, but when a member of staff is standing in front of a situation that needs an answer now, that isn't necessarily helpful.

And this is where our conversation took an interesting turn. We talked about the person who isn't reading English as their first language. The person who is dyslexic. The person who is neurodivergent. The person who simply doesn't have the time or mental bandwidth to work their way through a huge document during a busy shift.

We also talked about something else that happens in almost every organisation: the person who knows everything and I bet you are sitting reading this, knowing who this is in your team.

The member of staff everyone goes to because they've been there for years and somehow seem to know exactly what to do. But what happens when they're not there? Or worse, what happens when what they know is no longer correct?

That is why I think separating policy and procedure is so important. The policy should give us the anchor, the requirements, the rules and the things we must do. The procedure should bring that to life and answer the question staff actually need answered: “How do we do this here?”

And then there is technology.. What if, instead of searching through dozens of pages, a member of staff could simply ask a question and get the relevant answer from the approved policy or procedure? What if they could ask that question in their own language? What if the technology knew when it didn't have the answer rather than confidently making one up? And this is exactly where OpenDoc is trying to change things. 

OpenDoc’s Voice Agent means staff don't have to become experts in navigating policies and procedures before they can use them. They can simply speak to the document, ask the question they need answering and get a response based on the approved policy or procedure in front of them. It means the information isn't just sitting somewhere in a folder waiting to be found, it becomes something staff can actually interact with, at the point they need it.It also works across languages, and perhaps this is where we start to see the next disruption in social care - removing barriers that we've simply accepted for far too long.

That could change the relationship people have with policies completely. But ultimately, I don't think this is really about technology, it is about culture. It is about moving away from “this is how we've always done it” and towards “let me check, let me learn, let me make sure.”

Because social care has always evolved. Practices we once accepted as normal have changed because we learned something better, so maybe the question isn't how we get staff to read our policies, maybe we should be asking ourselves why we've made them so difficult to use in the first place.

Because if the information is there but nobody can find it, understand it or apply it when they need it, can we really say it is doing the job it was designed to do

Find out more about OpenDoc and our AI Voice Agent here:

To listen to the full podcast episode with Lucy Buxton and Mark Topps, click here