It’s natural at this time of year to reflect on all that’s happened over the last 12 months, as well as anticipating the new year and all that brings.
On top of our inspection and regulation work, our ongoing transformation has been a focus of our last year. One key aspect of this is having taken on new responsibilities under the Health and Care Act 2022 to assess local authorities and integrated care systems.
Learning by doing
I spent several weeks over the summer getting involved in our local authority pilot assessments. It’s been a joy for me to be out on site with the assessment team, working with them as we learn together how to do this really well. We’re grateful to the pilot sites – Birmingham City Council, Lincolnshire County Council, North Lincolnshire Council, Nottingham City Council, and Suffolk County Council – for stepping forward, and to all the people, including local authority teams, that we met along the way.
There’s the excitement of being involved in something new, of course. But we’re also beginning to see just how much we’ve been missing by not looking at commissioning and systems alongside providers.
The systems and local authority work we’re doing brings an additional dimension. Taken together with provider regulation, it will give us fuller oversight to help drive change for people using services and their loved ones. It helps us to identify and articulate the challenges faced across the sector. It can support and strengthen the understanding that adult social care – in all its forms – has a voice at the table, is respected, and is understood for all the benefits it can bring.
Also new is the assessment framework that all registered providers will be working on. It’s not change for change’s sake – the new framework allows us to be more responsive and agile in assessing health and care provision in England. It embeds people’s experience firmly at the centre of our regulation activity. The regulations remain the same. What would have been assessed as Good under the old framework will still be seen as Good under the new.
Of course, it’s going to take some getting used to – change always does. But at its heart, it’s a framework based on people’s experience. It’s built on ‘I’ and ‘We’ statements. We’ve been testing the new framework and a subset of the quality statements in our local authority work for a year now. Do they work? Yes, they do in that environment, but as we roll out there’ll be more evidence about what works and what might need tweaking. We remain open to making sure that it all works well. Please keep speaking to us and sharing your feedback on the new approach.
Sharing improvement
One of our key strategic aims is to accelerate improvement. One of the ways we do this is to highlight and showcase good practice when we see it through our regulatory activities. Earlier this year we inspected at Loveday Kensington, a residential care home providing nursing and personal care for up to 40 people. The people living there included older people, people with physical health conditions, and those living with dementia.
Our Deputy Director of Operations in London, Turon Karim, described the outstanding provision at the service and said, ‘People we spoke to were overwhelmingly positive about the exceptional levels of care and support they got from staff and managers. It was lovely to see such an excellent variety of activities, events and trips out that were organised by the home ensuring people led meaningful, interesting lives, something that others may take for granted.
‘People using the service and their relatives were positive about food choices available. We saw people had the option to choose what they wanted and had a good range of healthy and nutritious choices. It was also really encouraging to see Loveday support people’s relatives to join them, putting a real emphasis on the importance of mealtimes.’
The experience of the people using the service is central to staff members’ activities. They have a real commitment to offering people choice and control over their lives. That’s the heart of good adult social care, and we look forward to seeing more evidence of that in our new framework.