The new Care Quality Commission strategy for 2021 and beyond; what you need to know

“Regulation that’s driven by people’s needs and experiences, focusing on what’s important to people and communities when they access, use and move between services”.

Within this pillar are sub-actions from CQC which can be broken down as follows:

Listening and acting

CQC are now aiming to create new opportunities for people of any background to provide feedback on the care industry, with an aim for requests to be acted upon, rather than requests being repeated overtime. They want to hear from those who have had negative experiences with care services. Feedback from people who have had negative experiences will see improvements on how it is stored and how appropriately it is acted upon.

People and empowered

A key emphasis on how the CQC aims to raise public awareness of their mission and standing as a regulator. They aim to work closely with people who use services, to have a clearer understanding of people’s needs within the sector. They also want to create a clear understanding of what ‘outstanding care’ looks like within the sector and allow this information to be readily available to anyone who needs it.

Prioritising people and communities

An aim to see how well local systems work together and how effective they are when collaborating. CQC will look to publish success stories within the sector to promote outstanding care. CQC will also assess how local systems understand the needs of their communities. There will also be a push to develop shared understandings of the factors that contribute to inequalities within care.

What does this mean for care providers?

For now, all we can assume is that the CQC will deliver on these priorities, setting up a ‘smarter’ means of regulation that takes into heart the real expressed needs of people using care services and the wider public.

The CQC has always spoken with people using care services and other stakeholders as part of inspections. Now it seems the approach will be more proactive, seeking to utilise information from the public to build visibility of care services and local care systems, and use this information to act and improve on.

Care providers can take this new philosophy into their own practices and keep on top of what new requirements may come their way. For example, even more vigilance over care service quality and the experiences of people using services may be required. Those providers that engage most with their clients, family members, funders, and other stakeholders, those who proactively collect and act on feedback from those stakeholders.

This may require some providers to invest more resources into care quality monitoring tools. Providers should also review what systems they have to both enable their clients to share feedback easily and which allows them as providers to efficiently and effectively organise, manage and take action on the feedback they’ve received.

There may also be a greater emphasis on sharing real-time information with clients and their loved ones. This typically improves their overall experience of the service and reduces that negative feedback that simply arises because of a lack of information sharing and resulting confusion or concern.

For example, domiciliary care provider Your Home Care is one of many that has received very positive feedback from clients on their use of the Access Care Planning app. The app can also be used by clients and service users as well as care workers, to give live updates on care that is scheduled and visits that have happened. Here is one such piece of feedback they received:

“Your Home Care are the best homecare provider in the area and their reporting on an app after each visit is very informative and is tremendously useful, I commend this.”

The Director and Co-Founder of Your Home Care also commented that:

“The people we care for all talk about how they love that they can see who is coming to visit. We support this with photographs of staff members on their accounts. They love that they can see when visits are, and that family members can see what happened during visits from anywhere in the world.” Read the full case study.

“We will be smarter in how we regulate. We’ll keep pace with changes in health and care, providing up-to-date, high-quality information and ratings for the public, providers and all our partners.”

A breakdown of how the CQC plans to create smarter regulation can be broken down by their defined sub-categories:

Taking the right action at the right time 

The CQC maintain that on-site inspections will remain vital to their ratings of care providers but acknowledge that they are not the only way to assess performance. Instead, they will move away from a set schedule of inspections and will use “all our regulatory methods, tools and techniques to assess quality.”  Alongside this, visits will only occur when there is a clear need to do so, which could include a response to a risk or when data is limited on the provider.

More work will be put into building relationships with local care systems, allowing them to tailor future approaches based off insights they gain through conversations on care quality. A final point raised is the building of digital platforms that will “better integrate the data we (the CQC) hold”, relying on innovative analysis, artificial intelligence and data science.

More meaningful ratings

 A more ‘dynamic’ approach to rating care providers will mean changes to a provider’s CQC rating can happen without inspections, when there is evidence that shows a change in care quality. 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 

Relationships with services will aim to be more ‘collaborative’ with an emphasis on building trust and openness. To save on time, and reduce duplication, data will only be requested when it is needed and can’t be sourced elsewhere. Data will be stored once, and will be used as many times as necessary, without ever having to go back to the original source provider.

Digital improvements will be made so that any service can hand over information and update pre-existing information easier. By storing all this data in one place, services will have an easier time being able to access more of the information then before. When necessary, organisations that represent the CQC or represent those that use the services, will also be given data on services when it will help improve the current quality of care.

Adapting to changes

By keeping pace with the rate of change in the industry, the CQC aims to work with providers to ensure aligned activity. Assessments will be adapted to ensure they focus on what matters to people as they use and ‘move between’ services, and to ensure “equal and appropriate access to good health and care services for everyone. “There will also be an interesting view into how the culture of a service positively effects service quality and a drive-in care improvement.”

Most importantly they state, “We’ll expand our definition of what we consider to be a provider of care and what it means to carry on a regulated activity.” This will mean care providers, especially those responsible for directing and managing must understand fully and adhere to whatever this new definition evolves into, to stay completely compliant.

Relevant for all

By using their new definitions of quality care as reference, it will be easier to see what good and bad care looks like, both for providers of care and people choosing care services.

The CQC end by explaining they will move away from long reports written after inspections and develop more easy and understandable information in ways that suit stakeholders.

What does this mean for care providers?

The key takeaways here are that the CQC are going to maintain a need for onsite inspections but will look for other avenues to assess care providers especially when visits are deemed unnecessary.

Depending on how confident you are in service quality, this could be seen as good or bad news. It means that rather than ratings hinging on rare inspections, where your service could be having an exceptionally good or bad few days, the CQC will be more vigilant with ongoing monitoring of services.

This also means care providers that are also the most vigilant over care quality with ongoing monitoring of their own services will be best placed to benefit from the new approach and less likely to be ‘found out’ for lack of a better term. There are systems available to embed this vigilance and monitoring into your care services, such as Access Care Compliance.

The CQC are aiming to be more open with discussions with stakeholders within care, so ensure you are honest and ready to provide your thoughts when the time comes to do so.

“We will do more with what we know to drive improvements across individual services and systems of care. We’ll use our unique position to spotlight the priority areas that need to improve and enable access to support where it’s needed most.” CQC update: A new strategy for the changing world of health and social care, 2021

A breakdown of how the CQC plans to accelerate improvement can be broken down by their defined sub-categories:

Collaborating for improvement 

Through collaboration, the CQC will facilitate ‘national improvement coalitions ‘within health and social care. These coalitions will be built upon existing partnerships and will not seek to duplicate current efforts through new partnerships. The CQC will support all locally driven improvement efforts and assess how well people have access to care. From these local levels they aim to improve relationships to promote collaboration between national partners.

Making improvement happen

“We want to see improvements that benefit people.” By setting a higher bar, the CQC want to see improvements in quality supported by clearer standards of what they expect from providers of care. Services can expect the CQC to be more collaborative, building relationships to help providers find their own routes to improvement. The CQC will offer out resources to support services to improve, this will include facilitating conversations to drive change organically, rather then just telling services what to do. This will include the hosting of events and workshops, and by publishing resources and guidance to support them

Through collaboration, the CQC will identify areas that need the most improvement as a priority, at a local and national level. As well as this, they seek to “empower” local care systems to improve themselves by offering analysis and data. This access to data will enable services to self-assess and focus on how they can improve.

Encouraging innovation and research

Here the CQC state a need for accelerated improvement in innovative and technological change.

“We’ll encourage and champion innovation and technology-enabled services where they benefit people and where the innovation results in more effective and efficient services.”

Through advice and guidance, services will find support that they need to innovate and create a safer environment of care. Alongside this the CQC will keep abreast of technological change, to ensure they understand new ways that technology can be used to improve quality of care and help care providers overcome resourcing and staffing challenges.

In partnership with other stakeholders, the CQC wishes to see a coordinated approach to regulating new innovations and technologies within the sector.

An approach based on evidence 

Based on evidence the CQC will identify and investigate the factors that ensure good quality care. Through investments into research, the CQC will be able to understand external evidence of “conditions that drive quality improvement”. Research will investigate best practises including evidence from other industries that might help drive improvement.

What does this mean for care providers?

The CQC have clearly set precedence that they want to see change, and they want it start happening as soon as possible.

An intriguing area of conversation is that the CQC want to help facilitate care providers in utilising innovation and technology through a conversation and advisory role. It has been demonstrated conclusively that software helps improve care, by easing the burden of administrative tasks, improving processes and workflows, creating a better trained workforce and using data to drive up quality across services of all shapes and sizes.

Read case studies detailing the use of software to help care providers improve financial sustainability, organisational efficiency and care quality.

Helping you navigate the new CQC strategy 

As the CQC continues to evolve its strategy, providers need to keep up with the changes to stay compliant. It's not an easy task, especially when having to deal with the day-to-day challenges of running a care service. Fortunately, there are software solutions available that can help. 

At Access we have been supplying software solutions for the care industry for more than 30 years. We currently support over 11,000 registered care locations across the UK. 

Our Access Care Compliance platform helps your audits become more systematic and effective while managing, tracking and improving quality to make your services more compliant. 

Access Evo, our AI in Care tool, leverages the power of AI to help you carry out mock inspections in accordance with the CQC’s new inspection framework. The integrated AI allows you to flag any areas of concern and can create a roadmap for improving your CQC rating.   

To find out more about the care compliance software we offer at Access, contact us here to discuss your needs or book a demo.