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In July 2014 we published draft guidance for consultation to help providers understand and meet the requirements of new regulations which set out fundamental standards of care that come into force for all care providers on 1 April 2015. We also published guidance to help providers understand how we will use our enforcement powers to improve care services and protect the health, safety and welfare of people who use them.
We asked people to give us their views on these documents. People's views were:
- The new regulations guidance was clear, but we needed to provide more clarity around the terms and definitions such as registered professional and serious, multiple and persistent breaches.
- An overwhelming support for our new approach to enforcement.
- An emphasis on the need to clarify aspects of enforcement, in particular around services that are failing and may be prosecuted.
- We needed to provide more clarity on what constitutes serious, multiple or persistent breaches.
The main changes we made in light of these views were:
- Kept the elements of the guidance that respondents felt were helpful.
- Provided definitions that clarify key aspects of the guidance where respondents told us this was required. Registered professionals has now been changed to regulated professionals and an enforcement decision tree has been developed to define the different stages of breaches.
- Retained our new approach to enforcement with more frequent prosecution to encourage providers to improve.
- Included more detailed definitions for each step of the decision process to provide guidance on enforcement thresholds: serious, multiple and persistent.
We would like to thank everyone who responded to our consultation. Read our consultation response to find out more about the changes we have made as a result of your feedback.