In his first column for CMM, James Bullion, Interim Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Integrated Care at the Care Quality Commission (CQC), updates on the regulator’s new regulatory approach and encourages providers to reflect and share evidence of best practice and innovation.
I want to start with a thank you. Thank you to everyone who’s shared their thoughts and experience with us as we continue to move towards our new way of working. We’ve heard that you’re keen to make certain that you understand the guidance we’re producing before we start using our new assessment framework. That’s why we’ve flexed and adapted our roll-out model to ensure that you can get to grips with the changes in the ways we’ll be working together.
It’s worth a reminder, of course, that not everything is different. Throughout much of our model, ‘what’ we’re looking at isn’t changing a huge amount. It’s ‘how’ we’ll do it where you’ll see the difference. At the heart of our work, we’re still here to ensure that health and care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care. We’ll also continue to encourage those services to improve. That hasn’t changed.
Opportunity for change
Our new regulatory approach will enable us to be more streamlined and effective. We’re moving from “inspection” and its snapshot of care as we cross the threshold, to a much more dynamic and adaptive approach. Our new online systems will provide greater consistency, simpler processes, easier contact methods, more transparency and the ability to change a rating more quickly when you improve. We’re starting to invite providers to sign up to our new portal. Please do make sure that your contact information is correct so that, when it’s your turn to be invited, the right person receives the email.
Another of our key new pieces of work this year is our assessment of local authorities and integrated care systems. I am delighted that we have been given the remit under the Health and Care Act 2022 to build these relationships. We have a superb opportunity to look more effectively at how care is provided in a local system and can use our learning to share insights with national Government about local care.
I’ve said before that people are at the heart of all our work. That’s just as true in our systems assessment work as it is when we’re working with individual providers. We have both the opportunity and responsibility to amplify people’s experiences and to share good practice.
Your innovation journey
Last month, we published a report into how we as a regulator can support and encourage innovation in care. Our new assessment framework includes a quality statement focusing on quality improvement and innovation. We encourage you to reflect on and share evidence of the innovative ways you’re working to improve people’s lives. You can use our new innovation journey map to explore how you can try something new and read case studies from other providers who’ve improved outcomes in an innovative way.
We recently visited Abbey View, a care home in Dorset, and were pleased to be able to raise the home’s rating from Good to Outstanding. The home provides residential personal and nursing care for people, some of whom have life-limiting neurological conditions, such as motor neurone disease.
Speaking about the inspection, Roger James, our Deputy Director of Operations in the South, said, ‘We saw that people were encouraged and supported to maximise their independence. For example, the home was using innovative communication methods to support people who were losing their previous communication skills. This helped them to maintain relationships and make choices about their own care. Innovative records, including the 10 most important things to know about a person, provided staff with insight into people.’
Data to improve outcomes
We use the huge amount of data and evidence that we gather each year not just to publish inspection ratings for individual providers, but also to reflect on the whole health and care sector in England. In State of Care, published this month, we shine a light on the wellbeing of the workforce and the impact that positive wellbeing and staff enablement can have. The work we’ve done on staff wellbeing with front-line staff over the last year has helped us understand and define what ‘good’ looks like – something we’ll continue to showcase as our new quality statement on workforce wellbeing and enablement is rolled out in the new assessment framework in the coming months.