Assessing quality and performance

For health and care providers, there will be some differences in how we assess the quality of their services:

• Gathering evidence: We’ll make much more use of information, including people’s experiences of services. We’ll gather evidence to support our judgements in a variety of ways and at different times – not just through inspections. This means inspections will support this activity, rather than being our primary way to collect evidence.
• Frequency of assessments: We will no longer use the rating of a service as the main driver when deciding when we next need to assess. Evidence we collect or information we receive at any time can trigger an assessment.
• Assessing quality: We’ll make judgements about quality more regularly, instead of only after an inspection as we do currently. We’ll use evidence from a variety of sources and look at any number of quality statements to do this. Our assessments will be more structured and transparent, using evidence categories and giving a score for what we find. The way we make our decisions about ratings will be clearer and easier to understand.

We will refine and improve how this approach works as we start to test it and introduce it for providers.

Up-to-date, transparent assessments of quality

By using our assessment framework as part of our regulatory approach, we will have the flexibility to:

• update the ratings for key questions and overall ratings when things change, based on more frequent assessment of evidence
• collect and review evidence in some categories more often than others. For example, we may collect evidence of people’s experiences more often than evidence about processes
• be selective in which quality statements we look at – this could be one, several or all.