PIR guidance: hints and tips

Completing the PIR form

All questions on this form relate to:

• the service you provide for people receiving regulated activities, such as personal care
• staff and other people delivering regulated activities.

Do not include any information about people and staff who do not receive or deliver regulated activities. Regulated activities are those listed in Regulation 17(3) of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated activities) Regulations 2014 for which you are registered. Find out more about regulated activities.

Technical tips

To complete the PIR, please click on the hyperlink we emailed you. You need to connect to the internet when filling in, saving or submitting the form. We recommend using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as your internet browser to complete the form.

Mandatory questions are shown by a * at the beginning. You must complete these or the form will not submit.

Do not use spaces or characters in telephone numbers.

Do not use hyphens or other special characters such as bullet points in free text answers. Our software does not recognise these characters.

Email addresses must be in the correct format. For example, joe.bloggs@rac.co.uk

If you exit the form before completion, all your changes will be saved automatically and you will be able to make further updates and complete the form later.

If you click the ‘Submit’ button, your PIR will be submitted to CQC. When submitted, a message will pop up saying "Thank you for taking part in the survey". You will receive a confirmation email that will include an individual reference number. If you do not receive an email, check your spam or junk folder.

We'll email you a summary of your PIR responses. If you do not receive this, please contact ascinspections@cqc.org.uk

Complete and submit the PIR before the deadline date. If you do not, you may lose the information you have entered.

Do not use your browser's back button. Use the survey’s ‘back’ button instead. Otherwise you may lose some of your answers.

The questions in the data sections ask you for simple responses. These may be a number, a date, or a yes or no response.

Tips for completion

Make your answers as concise and clear as possible.

For each of your free text responses, include clear anonymised examples of evidence to support what you have written.

Where the answer is ‘not applicable’, please type ‘N/A’ for text fields or ‘0’ for numeric fields.

Limit your answer to 500 words in the free text boxes. This limit has been set to encourage you to focus on telling us the important things about your service and to minimise the time it takes to fill in the form.

If you share the form with colleagues, make sure you submit only one return.

Do not open the form on two computers at the same time. You may lose data.

Use your scroll bar to check for any further mandatory questions on the right side of the screen.

Do not send attachments with the PIR. If we need further information, we will contact you.

Guidance and support

Find out more in ‘How we monitor, inspect and regulate adult social care services’, the key lines of enquiry and characteristics of ratings. You should read these to have a fuller understanding of what the five questions mean. This will help you to focus when responding to the PIR.

Once you have completed and returned the form, we may contact you to ask more questions to clarify your answers or to provide further detail.

The questions in the guidance are for all service types. We will make it clear if a question relates to a specific service. 

If you have any questions about filling in or submitting the PIR, please read the relevant section of the guidance. Please contact ascinspections@cqc.org.uk if you cannot find the answer there.

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Pre-answered questions