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Your CQC inspection checklist

When it comes to CQC inspections, it’s important to remain calm and organised. The inspectors just want to see how your organisation operates on a day-to-day basis.


It can be a stressful, anxiety inducing experience for even the experienced, this guide provides you with a helpful CQC inspection checklist to help you achieve the best possible rating and add confidence to you and your staff during your next CQC inspection.

How to prepare for a CQC inspection

Preparing for a CQC inspection means ensuring staff understand fundamentals about care quality, safety and have a caring, person-centred approach. It means ensuring you have processes to respond to events, take actions and learn.

It means maintaining detailed, up to date, cohesive and comprehensive documentation on care for service users and your staff records.

The best way to be prepared for a CQC inspection is to ensure your care service is always doing the above.

This is the ideal, constantly maintaining the highest standards year round. But we understand this is difficult with so many competing priorities. Or you may simply want to double check you are as prepared as possible for your next inspection.

CQC Inspection checklist

Our CQC inspection checklist should help you be more prepared for a CQC inspection than you are already.

The headline points of the checklist are below and then scroll down to the section below that to get more detail on each point:

  • Inform and prepare staff on inspection fundamentals
  • Inform and prepare staff on questions they may be asked
  • Link innovation to outcomes
  • Link events to actions and outcomes
  • Check the quality of your care documentation
  • Check the quality of your personnel files
  • Don’t be afraid to ask the CQC inspector questions
  • Understand why you could be Outstanding and how to communicate it
  • Conduct mock CQC inspections

CQC Inspection Checklist - the details

CQC inspection framework

The CQC carry out regular inspections on care providers to ensure that the service users are receiving care that meets the CQC standards.

CQC has updated its inspection methodology and framework and will start using this updated framework and methodology by late 2023.

As part of these updates the CQC will retire the CQC Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOEs) which were first introduced in 2013.

The Key Lines of Enquiry were used by CQC inspectors to assess the care provider against the CQC 5 Standards (below). Once implemented, the CQC’s new inspection framework will use Quality Statements and Topic Areas in place of the KLOEs.

It’s important to be clear that the CQC 5 Standards and CQC Fundamental Standards are being kept, and it is the KLOEs which sit under them that are being replaced by Quality Statements and Topic Areas.   

The CQC 5 Standards:

  • Are they safe?
  • Are they effective?
  • Are they caring?
  • Are they responsive to people’s needs?
  • Are they well led?


The care service being inspected will receive a rating from the inspector for each of these areas and based on the performance in each of the 5 Standards the care service will receive a rating too.

These overall ratings the CQC awards are Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate. Providers are required to display their rating in an accessible way to the public.

How does the CQC inspect?

CQC Inspection guidance

How to get an outstanding CQC inspection

Conducting your own mock audits and the true value behind them. Include things around ACC and link to product tips, proven methods, being prepared and also what happens if you fail an inspection

How to pass a CQC inspection

  • Carry out a mock inspection
  • Be open and honest when completing the PIR (provider information return)
  • Read any guidance documents on what to expect

The true value of mock inspections

Preparation is everything if your care services are to make the grade. However, efforts shouldn’t be geared towards a single moment in time. It’s as much about what you do each day as it is about an impending inspection. Rigorous standards should be embedded within the organisation and be part of daily practice.

This is where mock inspections or internal audits come in. They can help to highlight weak points in processes, care procedures and more. They focus attention. It encourages providers to take a deep dive into how services are run and to cast a critical eye over where changes need to be made.

Conducting a CQC style audit requires structured systems and procedures, and technology is best placed to support this, making everything more manageable and robust. Having digital workflows that take you through each Key Question and Key Line of Enquiry means that you move through the steps in a methodical manner.

Focusing on areas that you struggle with and implanting action plans for improvement is where you will see the true value in mock inspections.

How often should you be carrying out your mock inspections? What should you be focusing on? Who should play inspector and how do you know if you doing well? These are all necessary questions to ask before putting your business to the test. For the same reason that personal trainers create workout plans that suit the people they are training. Lest you risk getting injured or left so ache ridden you can’t get out of bed the next day.

The ‘Get Fit for Inspection’ guide might be the most useful download you make all year. It’s a must have for those care providers who want to have the best CQC inspection they can, and to drive incremental improvements in their care services.

CQC recognising the benefits of using software in your service.

The final part to this resource page is around technology. We know that the health secretary has outlined a plan to complete the digitisation of health and social care by 2024. The CQC themselves have also highlighted how the right technology, deployed properly, supports high quality care, and therefore, can also help providers achieve better CQC inspection ratings too.

Having electronic care records, can help massively when it comes to evidencing, simply because all the documents associated with a service user’s care can be pulled up right away, instead of having to  trawl through filing cabinets and folders full of paper documents.

A system like Access Care Compliance fits perfectly with how the CQC assess care, enabling you to audit or conduct mock CQC inspections on your service to identify areas you need to improve, use the results to create action plans and then track your progress towards improvement. 

Furthermore, Access Evo, our integrated AI in Care software experience, will help you to proactively provide the standard of personalised and preventative care that CQC inspectors are looking for. With Access Evo you can identify weaker areas in your care service and gain a structured action plan to improve. 

The CQC recognise the use of technology which is now reflected in inspection reports that give an explicit account of how a service is using technology to make care better and so providers who have achieved that, are the ones who were awarded an outstanding inspection.

Technology enables efficient, reliable, person centered care, easing the burden on staff, improving accuracy and mitigating errors as well as making day to day caring easier by speeding up paperwork processes, allowing the carers to spend more time delivering care.

Find out how we can help you improve the quality of care you provide