What is the Council on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities?
Updated: Feb 8, 2022
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What is CARF?
CARF is an independent, nonprofit group of companies that serve to accredit organizations like Westbrook. Accreditation is a process that sets up standards to allow agencies to improve the quality of their services. Sometimes funding sources or other entities require agencies to seek accreditation by an entity like CARF. For Westbrook, we are not being required to seek this special accreditation; instead, we are seeking it ourselves as a way to indicate to others that we have high standards for the care we provide. Westbrook has applied for accreditation through CARF. If you are interested in seeing for yourself, feel free to check out the CARF website at the link below.
This means that we have submitted an application and requested that CARF surveyors (much like OHFLAC reviewers) come review all of our programming, policy, and procedure to offer a decision on whether or not they will accredit us. We have been working with consultants to get ready for this process and should be ready to go by the time it is our turn for survey (likely June or July of this year). We will be following two manuals of standards. One is for Behavioral Health programs and the other is for Employment and Community Services (many I/DD and community based Mental Health programs fall under this manual). Our consultants have been working with us to create/revise policy and procedure, to create program descriptions for every program we offer, to ensure we train all of our staff to the level that CARF requires, and to meet many other benchmarks. Our consultants came for an onsite visit in October. You may see them touring your programs. They had many nice things to say about what they saw. This is because all of you work very hard to make sure we are ready when OHFLAC comes to visit us. Thank you so much for that. We will be sharing additional information about the process over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions, please get with your manager or your Division Director and they can update you on what has happened so far!