How we are using our new approach to assessments

We are now using our new single assessment framework to assess registered health and care providers in England that we rate.

Your next assessment will be either:

• planned
• responsive (where we’ve received concerning information).

Your first assessments under the new framework will be based on a new assessment of your service and scores for your service based on your existing ratings.

If your service has not been inspected before, the first assessment will normally cover all the quality statements.

Frequency of assessment

We will regularly review how well the new single assessment framework is working and the timescales involved until the end of June 2024. We will use feedback from providers about their experiences of their assessment and will then decide new frequencies of assessment for each sector using:

• what we have learned from the first 6 months
• our view of regulatory risk
• issues affecting the health and care systems.

Our approach will be informed by risk, and we will decide the order of our planned assessments of providers based on the level of risk.

Once the new frequencies are decided, we will publish a more detailed schedule for planned assessments. This will include a date by when we will have updated all ratings for all providers. This will signal the end of our transition period. We expect to publish this information at the start of July 2024.

Focus of our assessments

When we set out our detailed schedule for planned assessments, we will also define a set of priority quality statements for each type of service. We will typically assess these quality statements in each assessment but we will be flexible depending on the circumstances.

We will determine the specific quality statements for each type of service nationally. These will be based these on findings from profiling of services to determine:

• where there are risks to people using services
• where services may have improved.

We plan to set the priorities and review them annually.