Work is ongoing at CQC to improve how we work so we can return to delivering good regulation.
Following on from May’s update, we have summarised what we’re currently working on to:
- deliver more assessments
- improve the experience of regulation
- strengthen our leadership
- make changes to our assessment approach.
Setting targets for assessments
We know that to deliver our purpose we need to complete enough assessments to give an up-to-date view of quality for the public and providers. We also need to make sure that our assessments are sufficiently comprehensive to give providers the information they need to improve.
To drive our performance in this area, we have set targets for the number of assessments we aim to complete so we all have a clear and shared understanding of what we need to do to deliver our purpose.
Between April 2025 and September 2026, we will deliver at least 9,000 assessments across all providers. That includes:
- 5,013 in adult social care
- 887 in secondary care
- 1,194 in primary and community care
- 1,500 in oral health and primary dental care
- 726 in mental health.
We are sharing these targets externally to be clear and accountable with the public we serve and the providers we regulate, and that everybody understands what to expect. Going forward, we will hold ourselves accountable by regularly sharing how we are performing against these targets.
To deliver these targets, we will keep improving our technology and assessment approach, to enable us all to do our job well.
We know that in the longer term, we need to deliver even more assessments. These targets are a first step towards that, but we will work to improve further in the future through fixes to our technology and moving back to specialist teams.
Alongside the number of assessments, we are tracking our performance through a full set of metrics. You can read more about these along with a roadmap for delivery in our recent Board papers.
Strengthening our leadership
External reports into our structural transformation identified the need for more specialist leadership around the sectors we regulate. In response, we have now confirmed 4 permanent chief inspectors:
Our new chief inspectors will support our move back to being structured around specialist operations teams. This ensures we have the right expertise in place to understand the quality of care being delivered across all the services we regulate. As the new chief inspectors start in their roles, we will update further on how we will do this.
Ensuring our assessment approach is fit for purpose
We recognise that our assessment approach needs to improve. It is currently too complex and not flexible enough to apply across all the sectors we regulate.
Over the last 2 months, we’ve started to engage with our staff, providers, the public and stakeholders to develop changes to our approach in the following 4 areas:
The content of our assessment framework:
- Reviewing duplication of quality statements
- Improving the wording and clarity of quality statements
- Outcome: a revised and refined list of quality statements.
How we apply our assessment framework:
- Defining which quality statements apply to specific sectors
- Outcome: frameworks that apply to different sectors.
How we make and maintain judgements:
- Revisiting how we deliver and maintain ratings
- Frequency of assessments and keeping ratings up to date
- Outcome: proposed approach to making and maintaining judgements.
Rating characteristics:
- Defining and describing ratings across all sectors
- Outcome: comprehensive list of ratings characteristics matched to each framework.
It’s vital that we develop these changes in partnership with providers, the public and stakeholders to ensure that we all have confidence in our assessment approach. Once our engagement on this comes to an end, and we have undertaken the necessary consultation, we will set out how and when we intend to make these changes happen.
Other areas of improvement
- Of the 500 ‘stuck assessments’ reported in January, 14 remained as at 29 June 2025. Dedicated improvement work is being undertaken to resolve these.
- From April to 29 June 2025, we completed 1,420 assessments. This exceeded set monthly targets.
- Targeted work is underway to improve processes for registration. This work aims to allow registration teams to focus their time on successfully completing applications and reducing backlogs.