CQC

The following has been taken from CQC's website:

We’re the independent regulator of health and social care in England.

Our purpose: We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve.

Our role

We register care providers.
We monitor, inspect and rate services.
We take action to protect people who use services.
We speak with our independent voice, publishing our views on major quality issues in health and social care.

CQCs New Strategy – Single Assessment Framework

The CQC released their new strategy in 2021, with an emphasis on collaborative working, patient engagement, safety through sharing learning from experiences of users of the service and professionals, quality improvements and adopting a flexible smarter approach to inspections and regulation.

“We set out our ambitions under four themes

People and communities: Regulation that’s driven by people’s needs and experiences, focusing on what’s important to people and communities when they access, use and move between services
Smarter regulation: Smarter, more dynamic and flexible regulation that provides up-to-date and high-quality information and ratings, easier ways of working with us and a more proportionate response
Safety through learning: Regulating for stronger safety cultures across health and care, prioritising learning and improvement and collaborating to value everyone’s perspectives
Accelerating improvement: Enabling health and care services and local systems to access support to help improve the quality of care where it’s needed most

Their aim is “to ensure health and care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and to encourage those services to improve. “

To deliver this new strategy, they are working towards a new Single Assessment Framework.

CQC new framework

Ratings and the five key questions remain
- four-point ratings scale (outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate).
- five key questions (safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led)
Quality statements focus on specific topic areas under key question. They set clear expectations of providers, based on people’s experiences and the standards of care they expect. They replace our key lines of enquiry (KLOEs), prompts and ratings characteristics.
We’re introducing six new evidence categories to organise information under the statements
Registration is also based on this framework. It is the first assessment activity for providers in an integrated process.

CQC - How we will use it

We will:

use a range of information to assess providers flexibly and frequently. Assessment is not tied to set dates or driven by a previous rating
collect evidence on an ongoing basis and can update ratings at any time. This helps us respond more flexibly to changes in risk
tailor our assessment to different types of providers and services
score evidence to make our judgements more structured and consistent
use inspections (site visits) as a vital tool to gather evidence to assess quality
use data and insight to decide which services to visit. When on site, we will observe care and talk to staff and people who use services
produce shorter and simpler reports, showing the most up-to-date assessment

Their aim is to introduce this during 2023. CQC published an update in April 2023 that tells us that:-

In summer we’ll start to roll out our new provider portal, notifying providers individually when they’re able to sign up. We’ll do this in stages and provide support and guidance.

They will be starting to roll this out in the summer with further developments later in 2023.

Later in 2023 we’ll gradually start to carry out assessments of providers in the new way.
These changes will take time and will continue into 2024. But we we’ll continue to keep everyone informed as we know that providers, local authorities, integrated care systems and others need time to prepare for the changes.

Over the coming months we’ll provide much more detail about how we’ll use our new assessment approach when we start to roll it out later in the year. We’ll give an update on what good looks like under our new assessment framework, the evidence we’ll prioritise and how providers will interact with our new operational teams.

We’ll also start to share case studies from the engagement work we’ve been doing on our provider portal.