Scott McMurray /
July 2024
What You Need to Know About the CQC Framework Updates
If you are a care manager, then you will be aware of how important your CQC rating can be. As an indicator of how safe, effective, responsive and caring your provision is, it can be very important to strive for good or outstanding ratings. As the CQC are now updating their frameworks, all care managers need to be aware of what these changes are, and how it can affect your care provision and your rating.
In this article, we take a look at how the CQC framework will be changing, and we will outline the key features that all care managers need to be aware of.
CQC quality statements
Quality statements are the commitments that providers, commissioners and system leaders should live up to. Expressed as ‘we statements’, they show what is needed to deliver high-quality, person-centred care.
Whilst the way in which the CQC assesses the care provision on offer will not change in many areas, there are some key aspects to it that all care managers will need to be aware of. One of the most significant updates will be the switch from three separate assessment frameworks, down to just one. This is intended to simplify the process and will be based on a single set of expectations, ensuring everyone is clear about what good care should look like.
The four-point rating system and the five key questions that the CQC uses to assess how well your care service performs will not be changing, but there will be new quality statements that are associated with those key questions and any related regulations.
These statements are designed to show the commitment of a care provider to being safe, effective, responsive, caring and well-led, and a score will be given based on how well a provider lives up to them. This means that instead of the 330 prompts associated with the five key questions, there are now just 34 quality statements (Environmental sustainability and sustainable development is included but not yet ) .
This allows both the regulators and the care providers to work with a more streamlined approach and can provide clearer definitions of what the CQC wants to see when it comes to excellent levels of care.
Evidence categories
The CQC will still be continuing their in-person inspections, but they will also be making use of ongoing assessments and a collection of evidence in order to form their ratings. In order to determine the extent to which a service lives up to the quality statements, the CQC will accept evidence from one of six categories.
- People’s experience of health and care services
- Feedback from staff and leaders
- Feedback from partners
- Observation
- Processes
- Outcomes
Different categories will be accepted depending on the quality statement that is being assessed, and the number of categories and evidence sources will vary depending on the service.
Scoring frameworks
Rather than an assessment at a single point, the CQC will now be changing overall ratings dynamically based on evidence that is collected at different times. They intend to review any evidence and apply a score for each piece. These scores will then be combined to give a score for the related quality statement. All statement scores will be combined to give a total score for the relevant key question, and the aggregate scores will lead to an overall rating. This is intended to make it easier for care providers to see which quality statements they need to work on in order to boost their scores and overall ratings.
It is important to understand the changes to the CQC framework, as this can have a huge impact on how your provision is assessed. It is intended to be a more transparent system that will allow providers to identify areas of weakness and work on them accordingly to improve the services that they offer and boost their ratings.
If you would like to learn more about the latest CQC single assessment framework and would like to book a 30-minute call with one of our Task Force Executives, please use the following link: https://calendly.com/delphi-care/30min?month=2024-07
If you would like to chat with one of our consultants, then why not book a meeting now.
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