Our human rights approach

1. Equality and human rights
2. Equality impact assessments
3. Information for providers: our human rights approach
4. Working for CQC: our commitment to equality

Our human rights approach is built into our regulation of health and social care.

Our high level approach to equality and human rights is still relevant and has worked well as a tool for change. However, we have made amendments to reflect changes in CQC and the health and social care system since 2014.

Why do we need a human rights approach?

We need a human rights approach because:

• Respecting diversity, promoting equality and ensuring human rights helps to ensure that everyone using health and social care services receives safe and good quality care. This is our core purpose.
• Our human rights approach helps us to apply our values, particularly excellence, caring and integrity to our purpose so that we consistently integrate human rights into the way we regulate.
• As a public-sector body, we have duties to respect, protect and fulfil the rights that people have under the Human Rights Act 1998 when carrying out our functions. We also have duties to eliminate discrimination and advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between different groups, under the Equality Act 2010.

When do we apply our human rights approach?

Our human rights approach will apply whether we are regulating adult social care services, hospitals, primary medical services or carrying out other regulatory functions – such as joint inspections of children's services, prison health services or themed work that crosses organisational boundaries. It applies whether we are registering services or inspecting services.

The document you can download explains the human rights topics that we need to consider to ensure people receive good quality care, and how we propose to look at these topics.