From listening to your views and experiences of care to analysing data about services, information and evidence play a vital part in our work.

What are the main ways we use information?

We're constantly improving the way we use information and evidence. The most important ways we use information in our work are:

• We gather and analyse information when services register, through continual monitoring and when we inspect them, and we listen to your views and experiences of care.
• We look at potential changes in quality by bringing together relevant information about a provider.
• We look at data and use it to monitor services continuously. It helps us to make sure the decisions we make are based on sound evidence.
• We use our Insight model to make decisions about what action to take.
• We make sure the information and data we hold is of a high quality and is as complete as possible. We will continue to find ways to make our information and data easily available to people we work with.
• We handle the information we hold carefully, making sure that the privacy, dignity and rights of people who use care services – and others whose information we have access to – are respected and protected.
• We publish our inspection reports and ratings to give you clear information, help you make choices and to help services improve.

Listening to people who use services

We listen to and act on experiences of care in our inspections and throughout our work.  We monitor changes in quality by bringing together what people who use services are telling us, knowledge from our inspections and data from our partners.

• Our registration and inspection teams include Experts by Experience – people who have personal experience of care.
• We work with local Healthwatch and we look at information we receive from other local groups to make sure we're listening to your views and opinions.
• We encourage you to share your views and experiences of care – both good and bad.
• We use data gathered nationally by other organisations, including:
  • patient survey data
  • information from NHS Choices
  • patient opinion feedback
  • the NHS Friends and Family Test.
• We form partnerships with charities and other organisations to gather feedback from people who contact them about their experiences of care.

We share our monitoring data with partners appropriately to improve efficiency and reduce duplicate requests for information from services.

Continuous monitoring

Information we use to monitor services includes:

• Data on quality, which helps us to plan our inspection activity.
• Information about people's experiences of care and the views of their families.
• Comments from staff and carers, specifically safeguarding and whistleblowing alerts.
• Other information that we collect directly from care providers.