It’s a pleasure to write this column after being appointed Director of Adult Social Care at the Care Quality Commission earlier this year. I am excited to be part of the newly established regulatory leadership team working with Kate Terroni, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care, and colleagues.
I have been involved with social care since 2009 and I have developed a deep knowledge and appreciation of the critical, and often overlooked, role that it plays in our life. I am often in close contact with people who use services and their families, providers, providers’ representatives, commissioners, and national and local government. Through these encounters, and through the lens of regulation, I have come to understand our opportunities to work together to strive for improvement.
New powers
As CQC’s Local Authority Assessment Lead, I am keen to update you on CQC’s new powers for local authority and integrated care system assessment, which come into effect from April 2023. I have no doubt these new responsibilities will give us the opportunity to drive improvement and share best practice across health and social care, more than ever before.
You may already be familiar with CQC’s transformation and the single assessment framework, which my colleague Kate Terroni wrote about last month. This framework will be used to assess local authorities and integrated care systems in a way that is consistent with how we will assess providers – but tailored to their context.
For local authority assessments, our strategic focus is to assess, ‘How well are local authorities delivering against their Care Act duties?’ To test our methodology for this, I led two test and learn projects in Hampshire and Manchester over the summer. With a team including inspectors, data analysts and policy leads, we tested aspects of our full assessment approach through the lens of two themes:
- How local authorities work with people – looking at the quality statement ‘assessing needs’.
- Leadership – looking at the quality statement ‘learning, improvement and innovation’.
We found a blend of virtual and on-site assessment worked well, and we produced a short report scoring each local authority against quality statements. The reports were shared with the local authorities we worked with, and their feedback will support development of our approach to reporting on our assessments.
From April 2023, when our assessment of local authority rolls out across England, we will enter a baselining period of assessments, which we anticipate will take around two years. This will help us to further refine our approach and build a picture of the quality of local authorities and integrated care systems. Importantly, we are developing principles for the sequencing of these reviews to minimise our asks of stakeholders, including registered providers like you, as we understand your time is precious.
We are listening
It is also incredibly important that the provider voice and the voice of care users are incorporated into work surrounding our new powers. We have been listening to you and working closely with your member organisations. With over 700 responses to recent surveying activity and seeing many of you attend our workshops and webinars personally, I’d like to thank you for your insights, which have informed our methodology development and engagement.
Provider feedback is extremely important to local authority assessments and the review of integrated care systems. We have heard from many of you about the importance of partnership working, addressing inequalities, data quality and proportionate regulation. I am passionate about improving the quality of care for people who use services. That is what brought me into regulation in the first place and it is what has kept me at CQC. I have seen what a difference effective regulation can make, not just to the quality and safety of the care but, importantly, to the quality of life for people and their families.
I look forward to keeping you updated on my work. In the meantime, you can find more information about our latest regulatory activity by looking on our website, signing up for email bulletins, watching our videos on YouTube or catching up with our podcasts.
Mary Cridge is the Director of Adult Social Care at the Care Quality Commission. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @CQCProf
Do you have a question for the CQC in relation to the topics discussed in this column? Share your feedback in the comments below.
it all looks good to me, i wonder if the assessment will include exploring if the local authority is delivering specialist deafblind assessments by appropriately qualified staff as per the care act?