Regulatory sandbox round 3 - community care at home teams

About this round

For this round, we focused on personal assistants (PAs) and other micro-providers, and the umbrella organisations that support them.

This includes individuals or small groups who are employed by people with care needs. They normally provide care for the person. That care is usually greater than that provided by a home care agency.

We’ve seen the emergence of umbrella organisations that support these individuals and groups. We’re including these umbrella organisations in this round because the way we regulate does not always fit their business model.

We are looking at if and how CQC should register umbrella organisations that:

• recruit people who want to work as paid carers
• assess applicants’ knowledge, skills and suitability
• match care and support workers with people who want care at home
• support these workers to gain new skills and knowledge as needed
• support workers to develop agreements on how care and support will be provided with the people they care for
• monitor the quality and safety of the service being provided

Typically, we expect them to:

• use self-managed team principles and methods
• have a strong interest in community networking, and asset and strengths-based approaches to care

Who should apply

You should apply if your organisation is:

• already delivering care at home or an introductory agency
• planning to open, or already running, a service that introduces care and support workers to people living in their own homes. Aiming to, or already delivering, hands on support to the carers that are introduced

Benefits of joining

You'll be able to:

• shape and define the new service type and how it is regulated
• apply to register under the new service type from January to September 2020
• learn in a network of service users, providers and innovators that are receiving, delivering and supporting the same kind of service
• be recognised by your key stakeholders

We'll reimburse reasonable travel expenses.

Entering the sandbox will not prejudice our rating of health or care services. It will not guarantee compliance with any of our regulatory outcomes. And it will not affect our assessments or judgments about the quality of services.

What you're signing up to

We expect participants to, at least:

• attend co-production workshops in London on Thursdays 28 November and 12 December 2019
• be open, and support the sandbox team to understand the nature of the solution and what good looks like
• complete one or two information returns
• allow for a site visit
• review a final report

Depending on our findings from phase 1, we will expect participants to be ready to:

• mobilise an ‘umbrella body’ service if this is appropriate and not yet operational
• develop with CQC, a way of assessing any new service type that we need to define to reflect the emerging care landscape
• review the tools and guidance we develop to register and inspect any new service type
• celebrate our achievements at a final summit, setting out our policy findings publicly

The sandbox team will:

• treat all providers fairly
• listen well to participants
• be open and seek input on our thinking
• be team-players
• work to protect your commercially sensitive information

How to apply

This regulatory sandbox round closed to applications on Monday 28 October 2019.

What happens next

A panel of CQC staff, sector stakeholders and people with lived experience selected between 3 and 6 applicants. They met on Wednesday 30 October 2019 to select the providers and make sure:

• organisations can represent this area of care and service model
• they're willing to rapidly deliver an ‘umbrella body’ type of homecare service if agreed (even if small scale)
• there's a good representation of different types of services delivering or seeking to deliver this model of care
• organisations applying are in scope for this sandbox round
• they're motivated to engage and available for the workshop dates

The panel has reviewed the applications and informed all applicants of the outcome.

Regulators' Pioneer Fund

This was made possible by a grant from the £10m Regulators’ Pioneer Fund launched by The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and administered by Innovate UK.