The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates all health and social care services in England. The commission ensures the quality and safety of care in hospitals, dentists, ambulances, and care homes, and domiciliary care.
“It is a vitally important regulation process which provides for an audit and rating service to ensure that every domiciliary care agency is striving to and operating to a good standard of care provision in all aspects of their business operations” commented Jacqueline Payne Registered Manager at Gabriel’s Angels.
“The CQC have just announced this month that they are delivering a reform to their operating processes, beginning with domiciliary care agencies in the South of England as part of a phased regional national roll out” she added.
The CQC have stated this month that this new strategy strengthens their commitment to deliver their purpose: to ensure health and care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and to encourage those services to improve. They announced that “our strategy is purposefully ambitious, and to implement it we will need to work closely with others to make it a reality. We’ll review this strategy regularly so we can adapt to changes and be prepared for what the future holds”.
The CQC has always had three assessment frameworks: one for hospitals, one for adult social care and one for primary medical services. Now, a single assessment framework has been developed by the CQC to streamline and simplify the process. The new single assessment model will replace set-piece inspections with continuous, ‘multi-point’ assessments designed to establish one clear understanding of what defines ‘quality’ care and ‘good’ service. The aim is to make the framework more accessible for everyone – including CQC workers, healthcare providers, and partners working in the system.
In moving from an inspection-based framework to a continual assessment one, providers will be expected to show how effective their care is through sharing data from multiple sources. This will largely be supported by a remote collection of information from providers, consistently and daily.
Jacqueline further enlarged: “the outgoing framework was largely based on inspections and audits, and while inspections will remain a crucial element of CQC assessment, the new regulatory model states that the CQC will carry out a rolling assessment of quality and risk. This means that inspections will not be the only way that CQC assess a care service. They will become a part of a broader style of ongoing assessment that will include:
- Different ways of understanding and assessing the experiences of people accessing care
- Hearing from staff and leaders in the agency
- Direct monitoring activities
- Evidence agencies submit to CQC
- Surveys and focus groups.
“We are looking forward to seeing the benefits of this new strategy for clients and our staff alike” Jacqueline concluded.