How we regulate dental, ambulance and independent acute healthcare services

About this consultation

In 2014 we asked people to share their views on our plans to change the way we regulate, inspect and rate adult social care services, NHS acute hospitals, community health, specialist mental health services and NHS GP and out-of-hours services.

This consultation was about our plans to change the way we regulate services that were not part of our first consultation.

The changes included things like:

• what we look at on an inspection
• how we judge what 'good' care looks like
• how we will, or won’t, rate services to help you judge and choose care if you want to
• how we use information to help us decide when and where we inspect.

We set out our detailed plans in three consultation documents for:

• NHS and independent ambulances
• Primary care dental services
• Independent acute healthcare

We developed the changes outlined in these documents over the previous year together with the public, providers, our staff and organisations with an interest in our work. The changes were originally signalled in our three-year strategy in April 2013 and we developed our thinking by setting out some initial proposals in a series of fresh start documents. We also tested our new style inspections in ambulance, independent acute healthcare and dental services. Our final plans, developed using the feedback from this consultation, will be published in early 2015 and the changes will come into effect in April 2015.

The main changes are:

• introducing new ways to inspect services, with Chief Inspectors and more specialist teams that include members of the public
• using a new system of intelligent monitoring to help us decide when, where and what to inspect.
• listening to people's experiences of care and using the best information across our monitoring system.
• judgements based around the five key questions we ask of all services:
  • Are they safe?
  • Are they effective?
  • Are they caring?
  • Are they responsive to people's needs?
  • Are they well-led?
• Ratings based around the five key questions for ambulance and independent acute healthcare services.
• We proposed that we wouldn't rate primary care dental services but we asked you to give us your thoughts about rating them in the future.