Assessing quality and performance

As we roll out our assessment approach we will ask providers for feedback and use it to update and develop this guidance.

Our new assessment approach

Our guidance to support providers in our new approach to assessment is all online. You can download and print the guidance, but we will refine and update it, so you must keep up-to-date. Our new framework retains our 5 key questions and the 4-point ratings scale. We will assess services against quality statements. These replace our key lines of enquiry (KLOEs), prompts and ratings characteristics.

We will gather evidence both on site and off site to make an assessment. The types of evidence we will consider are grouped into 6 evidence categories. We list the evidence categories we will look at for different sector groups.

Our assessments may be responsive (in response to information of concern) or planned. In both cases, we will be flexible and may expand the scope of an assessment if we need to.

We will continue to ask adult social care providers to complete an annual provider information return (PIR).

When it will affect you

We are rolling it out by region so we can test and improve. Our guidance on how we are starting our new assessment approach sets out this process and the dates.

We will let you know when new assessments will be starting in your area. We do this by emailing your nominated individual and registered manager. If you provide several services, we may start using our new approach for some services ahead of others.

It’s important to make sure your registered details and contact information are up-to-date.

You do not need to have an account on our new portal for us to assess you using this new approach. We are developing our portal to communicate about assessments but at first we will use our established methods.

Although we will apply our new approach to services that we do not rate, we are not proposing to do so until after March 2024. We will adapt our new approach so it does not include rating these services.

Engaging with you during assessments

Starting an assessment

We will continue to apply existing rules when giving notice of assessments. This includes where we carry out unannounced on-site activity.

We will email you to tell you when an assessment is starting. We may ask you for documentation at this point.

During an assessment

In some cases, we may not need to carry out a site visit at all if the scope of our assessment does not require this. If we do need to make a site visit to gather evidence, Experts by Experience or a specialist may support us.

We will give feedback to the provider when we have completed either an on-site or off-site assessment. If possible, we will give feedback about on-site activity immediately after completing it.

Our ratings and reports

After we complete an assessment we will use a scoring system to produce a rating for your service.

See how we will calculate the first scores. If your service currently has a rating, we have transferred that across by applying scores to quality statements. You will have a chance to check the factual accuracy of our draft assessment report.

Publishing reports and ratings

We will publish your report as web content rather than in a PDF document. It will contain sections for each area of the framework we have looked at during the assessment.

If your ratings change as a result of our assessment, we will also publish these.

You can still ask us to review how we produced your ratings to check we followed our process correctly.