At the end of last year, we consulted on our proposals to evolve and improve our approach to assessing and rating health and social care providers. We’re now moving forward with our plans for a sector-based approach to regulation.
Our proposals in our consultation 'Better regulation, better care' included moving away from a single assessment framework to separate frameworks that are more specific and relevant to the health and care sectors that we regulate.
We considered the responses and listened to feedback, which showed overwhelming support for this proposal, and have therefore developed an initial 4 draft sector-specific assessment frameworks for:
- adult social care
- mental health care
- primary care and community services
- hospitals (secondary and specialist care)
Key additions in the draft assessment frameworks
Our 5 key questions remain fundamental to our assessments (safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led). They will be supported by:
- key lines of enquiry framed as structured questions that describe what we will look for on our assessments – these replace the current quality statements
- rating characteristics that describe what outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate care looks like in each sector.
Through our online and in-person engagement sessions, we asked people what they thought good quality care looks like, to enable us to develop rating characteristics that describe care under a rating of good. Using this, we then developed characteristics for each level of rating (outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate) for each sector framework.
Feedback from the consultation also showed support for our proposal to remove scoring from our assessment methodology and make rating judgements directly at key question level. The rating characteristics will therefore support this change.
We are grateful to everyone who provided their feedback, whether online or through our engagement events.
You can read our initial response to the feedback from the consultation as well as a more detailed evaluation report of the feedback.
Give your feedback and views
We are now actively asking colleagues, providers, the public and other stakeholders whether the draft content of these 4 frameworks will:
- guide CQC in carrying out assessments and making clearer, more transparent and consistent judgements about quality
- help providers to understand what CQC will be looking for and improve the quality of care they deliver
- help CQC and providers to identify and address the issue of inequalities in care
- reflect the range of services and sectors that we regulate across health and adult social care.
We also welcome views on any areas that need to be developed or improved.
After reviewing this feedback, we will further refine each framework to enable us to pilot and test them in practice this summer.
How to respond
Visit our consultation page to read the background and context for the assessment frameworks and the draft assessment framework(s) From there, you can submit your feedback through our our online participation site.
We are also holding a number of engagement events around the country this spring. The opportunity to express interest in attending these events has now finished, but anyone interested can sign up to our bulletins to receive information on future events and other engagement opportunities.
The period for sharing feedback online and through in-person events will close on 12 June. Thank you for your continued support with this work.