The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and social care in England. Their aim is to make sure better care is provided for everyone, whether that’s in hospital, in care homes, in people’s own homes, or elsewhere.
What Care Quality Commission (CQC) do
CQC regulate health and adult social care services, whether provided by the NHS, local authorities, private companies or voluntary organisations. And, we protect the rights of people detained under the Mental Health Act.
CQC regulate health and adult social care services in England, whether they’re provided by the NHS, local authorities, private companies or voluntary organisations. And, we protect the rights of people detained under the Mental Health Act.
CQC make sure that essential common quality standards are being met where care is provided and we work towards the improvement of care services. We promote the rights and interests of people who use services and we have a wide range of enforcement powers to take action on their behalf if services are unacceptably poor.
CQC work brings together independent regulation of health, mental health and adult social care. Before 1 April 2009, this work was carried out by the Healthcare Commission, the Mental Health Act Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. These organisations no longer exist.
CQC main activities are:
- Registration of health and social care providers to ensure they are meeting essential common quality standards
- Monitoring and inspection of all health and adult social care
- Using our enforcement powers, such as fines and public warnings or closures, if standards are not being met
- Improving health and social care services by undertaking regular reviews of how well those who arrange and provide services locally are performing and special reviews on particular care services, pathways of care or themes where there are particular concerns about quality
- Reporting the outcomes of our work so that people who use services have information about the quality of their local health and adult social care services. It helps those who arrange and provide services to see where improvement is needed and learn from each other about what works best
Rating Rules
CQC work out the quality rating for a care service by looking at how well the service meets the desired outcomes set out in the national minimum standards. We call these judgements.
CQC use a set of guidelines, called the Key lines of regulatory assessment, to judge how well services are meeting outcomes.
Generally speaking, the more outcomes that are graded as excellent the more likely a service is to achieve 3 stars. The more outcomes that are graded as poor the more likely a service is to be rated as 1 or zero stars. However, in awarding a quality rating we take particular account of how safe and how well managed a care service is.
As they are especially important to quality we have stricter rules for those outcomes relating to safety and management. Services can only be as good as their ‘poorest’ rating in these areas.
Quality rating judgement tool
This is the tool inspectors use to calculate the quality rating for a service following a key inspection. Service managers can also use the tool to confirm they have been rated correctly.
Rules for each quality rating
3 star service (Excellent)
It must be possible for a service to be ‘3 star’. In other words, the expectation is not for perfect services but for particularly good services, well managed, and with a sustained track record of high performance.
- Services cannot be 3 star if any outcome group is scored as being poor, and;
- outcomes relating to safety and management must be at least good and;
- at least one outcome relating to safety and management must be excellent and;
- at least 50% of outcome groups must be judged as either good or excellent (for example, if there were 7 outcome groups for your type of service, 4 of the outcome groups would need to be good or excellent) and;
- a brand new service cannot be excellent at the first key inspection following registration, as it would lack a track record of performance over time. By brand new we mean that the service, as it is registered, did not operate before registration. Those services can only achieve a 2 star, good, rating. But;
- there are times when a service is already registered with us but has to make application for registration due to changes in the way it is to be run. It will be possible for those services to achieve an ‘excellent’, 3 star, rating at their first key inspection as long as the first four bullet points (listed above) are met. To achieve an excellent rating the service will need to have demonstrated excellent and good practice consistent with the Key Lines of Regulatory Assessment (KLORA). Excellent services will have a sustained track record of delivering good performance and managing improvement. Read more about this rule.
2 star service (Good)
A ’2 star’ service may have some excellent outcomes.
- Services cannot be good if any outcome group is scored as poor, and;
- outcomes relating to safety and management must be at least good, and;
- at least 50% of outcome groups must be judged as at least good
1 star service (Adequate)
A ’1 star’ service may have some outcomes that are good, even excellent.
- Outcomes involving safety and management must be at least adequate and;
- at least 50% of outcome groups must be at least adequate
0 star service (Poor)
A ’0 star’ service may have some strengths. It may have some good or even excellent outcomes, or it may be a generally low performing service. The key issue is that it does not perform as a safe service.
- One or more outcome groups that focus on safety and management are judged poor or
- It does not meet the rules for a 1 star, 2 star or 3 star service
More details are available from Care Quality Commission (CQC)
NB: the above information was provided with the permission of Care Quality Commission (CQC) - http://www.cqc.org.uk/
