Responding to the review into our operational effectiveness by Dr Penny Dash, and to what providers and stakeholders have been saying for some time, we have now set out our improvement approach. At the centre is our core purpose – ensuring that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and encouraging services to improve.
How did we get here?
Dr Dash’s review highlighted issues that have been a turning point for CQC. In addition to getting back to our core work, we have been reflecting on what we have learned. We know we were too ambitious, taking on too much in too little time with not enough resources or expertise. We also did not listen enough to people who were flagging concerns. This led us to defend our decisions and maintain our course, even when this was unlikely to have the desired impact.
We have developed an approach to recovery that supports the report’s recommendations. We have held regular conversations with Dr Dash to discuss how our changes align with the final report’s recommendations. These actions will help us deliver a clear and transparent assessment programme; improve how quickly and effectively we can register and assess providers; and publish simpler and clearer reports.
What happens now?
Our aim is to rapidly improve our understanding of the quality of care through improved operational performance and re-building provider engagement. Sir Julian Hartley has been appointed as our new Chief Executive and we will be appointing at least three Chief Inspectors to strengthen leadership across the sectors we regulate. In addition, a range of internal improvements will increase our number of monthly assessments.
Actions include:
- Changing how we use our technology in the interim and working differently. We will examine how to improve our assessments, factual accuracy checks and report publishing. We will also be making changes to the processes we use for registration. You will have different interactions with us because of these changes. Please keep sharing feedback about your experiences as we make these changes.
- Changing the single assessment framework. We will be scoring at quality statement and rating at key question level. Assessments will still evaluate evidence categories to reach a quality statement score, but we will not score evidence categories. We will apply professional judgement to ensure it is a complete picture and the quality statement scoring is correct. This will allow us to assess and inspect more services while ensuring our ratings are robust. This will also allow us to produce better reports that are clearer about our judgements and ratings.
- Evaluating new approaches to ensure they bring us closer to our core purpose. We will independently evaluate our work and liaise with providers if new approaches are rolled out more widely.
Hearing you
We have asked Professor Vic Rayner OBE as Care Provider Alliance Chair to review the single assessment framework from your perspective. Her review will inform any changes or improvements that can be made. In addition, we are planning a series of roadshows for you to connect with your local CQC teams, learn more about specific aspects of our assessment approach and take part in activities to co-design the improvements we are making. We will share more information on this soon.
In the meantime, we will continue to engage with you, the public and wider stakeholders through our established channels, online engagement sessions and our online participation platform. Please keep feeding back your views and experiences of our changing assessment processes. We are all trying to do the best for people – together, we can achieve that.
Want to learn more about CQC’s single assessment framework? Listen to or watch the latest episode of CMM’s OFF THE PAGE podcast, coming soon. Catch up on all episodes here.
James Bullion is Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Integrated Care at the Care Quality Commission.
Email: [email protected] X: @CQCProf