The care quality commission releases CQC’s new strategy for the changing world of social care and health. A CQC inspection is a big deal for your home care agency; every system, process, and procedure in your service will be under scrutiny. The new strategy will give guidance on how they’re changing regulations to improve care for everyone.
The new strategy of CQC
There are 4 themes outlined in the new strategy that the regulator has categorized their ambitions into.
- People & communities
- Smarter regulation
- safety through learning
- Accelerating improvement
Core ambitions of CQC’s new strategy
Two main goals go across each theme:
- Assessing local systems: Providing independent assurance to the public about the quality of care in their area
- Tackling inequalities in health and care: Equal access, experiences, and outcomes from health and social care services.
People & communities
People are empowered and always be at the center of the quality of care. The CQC’s new strategy aspires to be clearer about its role as a regulator and to actively raise public awareness of what they do.
Sub-actions from the CQC strategy within this pillar, are as follows:
Listening and acting
CQC is currently working to build new ways for individuals of all backgrounds to submit feedback on the care business, to respond to requests rather than repeat them.
People and empowerment
The CQC’s goal of raising public knowledge of its mission and role as a regulator is a major focus. They want to collaborate closely with people who use services to gain a better knowledge of the sector’s requirements.
Prioritizing people and communities
To promote excellent treatment, the CQC will try to share success stories from the sector. The Commission will also look at how local systems comprehend their communities’ needs.
Smarter regulation
CQC shies away from using predefined inspections to a more flexible and focused approach to assessing quality. It will adopt a more dynamic approach to ratings, relying more on data and feedback sources to update ratings more frequently. There are the following sub-sections within this new CQC strategy pillar.
Taking the right action at the right time
On-site inspections will continue to be important in the CQC’s evaluations of care providers, but they are not the sole means to measure performance. Instead of following a strict inspection schedule, they will examine quality using “all of our regulatory procedures, tools, and strategies.” In addition, visits will only be made when there is a clear need for them, such as in response to risk or when the provider’s data is restricted.
More meaningful ratings
CQC strategy states a more ‘dynamic’ approach to rating care providers. Ratings will also see an evolution in what they reflect, with people’s experience with a provider being central to this.
Making it easier to work with us
The new strategy aims to have strong relationships with services that will be more ‘collaborative,’ with a focus on trust and transparency. To save time and avoid redundancy, data will be asked only when it is necessary and cannot be obtained elsewhere. Without ever having to return to the source provider, data will be kept once and used as many times as necessary.
Adapting to changes
The CQC intends to collaborate with providers to ensure aligned activities by keeping up with the rate of change in the industry. “There will also be an interesting look at how a service’s culture influences its quality and drive in care improvement.”
To remain completely compliant, according to the new CQC strategy, care providers, particularly those responsible for guiding and managing, must fully comprehend and adhere to whatever this new definition turns into.
Relevant for all
The new CQC strategy states that they will shift away from lengthy inspection reports in favor of developing more simple and clear information in ways that are beneficial to stakeholders.
Safety through learning
A breakdown of how the CQC defines Safety through learning can be broken down by these sub-categories:
The importance of culture
The new CQC strategy drive to improve learning cultures, where staff will be encouraged to speak up on any concerns, they have about safety issues within the workplace. The CQC also emphasize that care staff can go directly to them if they have any safety concerns about their workplace, where actions will be taken swiftly.
Building expertise
The CQC will do two things
1). look at how systems assure themselves that they have the right knowledge and expertise to ensure safety and if they are investing in improving safety.
2). They will also ensure they increase their expertise to ensure their “approach is in line with the latest safety thinking”.
Involving everybody
The CQC will use a more collaborative approach to transform safety and uphold human rights within care.
Regulating safety
The CQC will begin focusing on services that have inferior cultures and are going unnoticed. The goal is to figure out what is causing the poor culture in these services and why. To guarantee increased consistency across the board, an assessment of how successfully safety is evaluated and monitored, as well as how data is acquired, will be conducted.
The CQC is urging providers to use learning and improvement as their “first response” to any safety issues they may have. The CQC wants to see more accountability from services addressing safety by providing public data. Both the regulator and the individuals who use the service will expect services to demonstrate what steps they will take to learn and improve.
Consistent oversight and support
The fourth subgroup of CQC’s new strategy focuses on assistance and guidance, to ensure that all caregivers have access to the resources they need. The CQC will address the national discourse on safety inside the sector using insights and their own “independent voice.”
Accelerating improvement
The final major aspect of the CQC’s new strategy is to facilitate ongoing improvement. The following is a breakdown of how the CQC intends to expedite progress through its specified sub-categories:
Collaborating for improvement
The CQC will make it easier for ‘national improvement coalitions’ in health and social care to work together. These coalitions will be formed on existing relationships, rather than attempting to duplicate existing initiatives through new collaborations.
Making improvement
“We want to see developments that are beneficial to the general public.” The CQC wants to see increases in quality accompanied by clearer expectations of what they expect from care providers by raising the bar. The CQC will supply resources to help services improve, such as hosting talks to help services drive change organically rather than directing them on what to do. This will entail holding events and workshops, as well as publishing tools and information to help them succeed.
Encouraging innovation and research
The CQC’s new strategy emphasizes the need of accelerating innovation and technological progress.
Services will receive the aid they need to innovate and create a safer care environment through advice and guidance. In addition, the CQC will keep up with technological advancements to ensure that they are aware of new ways that technology can be used to improve care quality and assist providers in overcoming resourcing and staffing difficulties.
An approach based on evidence
The latest CQC strategy will find and explore the variables that ensure high-quality care based on evidence. The CQC will be able to grasp external evidence of “conditions that encourage quality improvement” through investing in research. Best practices will be investigated, as well as data from other industries that could aid in driving development.
