The Care Quality Commission checks whether hospitals, care homes and care services are meeting government standards. Visit our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Involving people who use services
We try to involve people who use health and social care services in everything we do.
Working with local groups
Find out about How we work with local groups.
We have set up various groups with people who have experience of using care services.
These groups share and listen to each others’ experiences and give people the opportunity to work closely with carers, experts and major organisations to discuss areas of improvement.
Acting Together
Our Acting Together project enables us to involve people who have experience of using health or social care services in our work.
Under the project, people who have experience of using care services (who we like to call Experts by experience) take part in our inspections of health and social care services and mental health wards.
We currently work with 300 Experts by experience. They spend time with our inspectors to observe the care environment and identify good and bad care. Because they have first-hand experience, they know which questions to ask people to get as much information from the visit as possible.
Their findings are used to support the inspector’s judgement on the service and can also be included in the inspection report.
Members of Acting Together can also take part in a range of other activities including ways to develop our processes, events, consultations and CQC staff training events.
Young people
In early 2012, we started involving young people in our inspections.
To help us plan this, we ran a workshop in February with a group of young people aged between 14-21 years old.
Get involved
We work with national and local organisations that recruit, train and support our Experts by experience.
For more information on Acting Together you can also email our National Contact Centre.
We work with local networks and committees who represent local people to share information and tackle poor care together. This includes Local Involvement Networks (LINks), Overview Scrutiny Committees for health and social care (OSC), local councillors and Foundation Trust Councils of Governors (FTCG).
LINks
LINks (Local Involvement Networks) are groups of local people and community groups that work together to improve health and social care services in their area.
We have a statutory duty to work with LINks across the country. We also run a national LINks advisory group to guide our work.
LINks gives individuals the chance to give us feedback about what they have experienced in local care services.
Download all of our Bulletins and guides for LINks.
If you would like to get involved in LINks, you can find contact details for your local network from the NHS Centre for Involvement website.
Overview and scrutiny committees
We work locally with scrutiny committees across the country.
We also run a national security sounding board to help guide our work.
Download all of our Bulletins and guides for OSCs.
Local councillors
We have published a guide for local councillors interested in understanding how they can work for us.
Foundation trust councils of governors
We have published a guide for foundation trust councils of governors on working with us.
Patterns of health and social care
Looking at patterns of health and social care is a normal part of what we do as the regulator.
We monitor patterns of health and social care in two ways.
- Our surveys collect the views of people using a range of health care services provided by the NHS. Our latest Inpatient survey 2010 looked at the experiences of inpatients throughout 2010.
- We look at national and local patterns of care, known as Reviews and studies, across different services. One of our latest reviews, Social services' response to people's first contact with them, looked at people’s first contact with their council.
Working with groups
We work in partnership with lots of different groups. Each one caters to specific areas of care and strives to ensure better practice around the country.
Get our newsletter
Every month, we send out newsletters to different groups of subscribers with our latest news, guidance and case studies.
Whether you are a member of the public, the provider or manager of a service we regulate or a health or social care professional, you can sign up to receive the content most relevant to you.
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News
Care home worker sentenced
13 April 2012
Equality objectives published today
5 April 2012
Another 18 reports from our review of learning disability services published
4 April 2012