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WELCOME FROM CQC
James Bullion CBE, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Integrated Care at the CQC, shares the latest updates from the regulator regarding the new assessment framework and explains what providers need to consider in 2024.
2024 brings with it a year of new approaches for CQC. By the spring, all regulation will be done against our new assessment framework. This includes our assessments of how local authorities are performing against their duties under Part 1 of the Care Act.
Assessing local authorities and integrated care systems (ICSs) represents the largest extension of our regulatory responsibilities in over a decade. It offers an opportunity for us to see and present a more holistic view of the system and the services within it.
We will be able to look across a whole system to see the journeys that people have to navigate to access health and social care. The aim of our local authority assessments is to increase transparency and local accountability. Also, to make good practice, positive outcomes and outstanding quality easier to spot locally and share nationally.
We’ll start to roll out our full assessments of local authorities during 2024. We're using the learning from our five pilot assessments to inform our full approach and will carry on
developing and refining this throughout the year. Our updated guidance gives an overview of our plans, including the evidence we'll be using and how we'll collect it. Our new framework will help us determine during these assessments where commissioning arrangements are facilitating the meeting of needs and sustainability of care – also a ministerial priority for Government. We expect to see an authority level approach to this in terms of both cost and environmental sustainability.
In addition to the system-level assessments, our new assessment framework is being rolled out to all providers in England. Colleagues in the South were the first to be assessed under the new framework and providers across the remaining regions will all have moved across by March 2024. We have produced support and guidance to help you prepare for these changes.
One key message I’m keen to share is that these changes are really about how we are assessing services. What we’re looking at remains much the same. The regulations haven’t changed –and our job remains to ensure
that health and care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care. We’ll also continue to encourage those services to improve. The framework is very much about a person’s experience of care. Our ambition is always to regulate through the eyes of people who use services and those who care for them.
The new regulatory approach is designed to be more responsive, streamlined and flexible. New online systems will help provide greater consistency. The new provider portal’s simpler processes and easier contact methods support the ability to change a rating more quickly when you improve. The new framework contains quality statements that will help individual providers and systems alike focus on their improvement, innovation and sustainability.
In our most recent State of Care report, we are vocal about how sustained work on social care reform to make the system fairer, along with an industry level workforce strategy, is in everyone’s interests. Our report noted that the increases in the cost of living mean some providers are struggling to pay wages in line with inflation. In some instances, people are reducing their care packages because of price rises. Coupled with local authority budgets failing to keep pace with the rising costs and increases in numbers of people needing care, risks of ‘unfair care’ are elevated.
We have big ambitions and responsibilities to deliver through our regulation. And supporting the sustainability of the social care sector through our regulatory activities and sharing examples of good existing practice across the country support that.
5 Care England
James Bullion, CBE. Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Integrated Care, CQC. @JamesBullion