On the 21st of December, the CQC released ‘Our revised plan and approach for transformation,’ a news post detailing changes to their New Assessment Approach and delays to the rollout of new Adult Care Assessments. For our January 2023 Blog Post, ClouDoc bring you the key points of this latest CQC press release and let you know how these changes might affect your care business this year.

Changes to Inspections

In November 2022, the CQC released an article on how their plans would affect their day-to-day operational practices, and these changes will have the most significant effect on their inspections processes and the structure of their operational teams.

The deputy chief inspectors who currently head up CQC’s operational teams will be superseded by a dedicated director, meaning teams will now be administered by an officer in a more specialised role. The CQC hopes this will provide more objective oversight and effective management of their inspectors.

The structure of operational teams is also set to change significantly. The current specialist sector teams, split across adult social care, primary medical services, and hospitals, will be combined into a single operations group, allowing for greater integration of standards, practices and lessons learned throughout the CQC’s activities in these diverse sectors.

While specialist teams are being consolidated to facilitate consistency, communication and mutual improvement, the CQC will divide the operations group geographically to establish local teams and provide more accurate and tailored inspections suited to the strengths and needs identified in each local area. This will allow the CQC to be more responsive to systemic shortcomings in an area or region’s care provision and gain a more granular and accurate view of care in local areas.

These local teams will be now be administered within four regional ‘networks’; Northern England, Midlands, London and East of England, and South England, and will comprise a number of roles:

• Assessors (Establish an ongoing overview of local care activities, using evidence both on- and off-site)
• Inspectors (Lead enforcement activity and inspections, collecting on-site evidence)
• Regulatory co-ordinators (Lead engagement with local providers and community stakeholders)
• Regulatory officers (Support and administrative duties such as inspection planning)

Local team leaders and Regional Network directors will be able to scale and configure these teams depending on the service types, infrastructure/ pre-existing assets, and unique challenges or issues in each local area. The CQC hopes this will result in a more inclusive, multifaceted way of assessing care services, more cognizant of local area needs.

A Last-Minute Change of Plans

Although the CQC intended to introduce the new assessment approach this month, January 2023, they have now stated that this will be pushed back and have provided the open-ended estimate that this will be completed ‘later in 2023.’ In order to ensure that their new systems and changing professional relationships have no adverse effect on partner agencies, care recipients and the conduction of provider inspections, the CQC will be introducing their changes gradually, in stages.

For most care providers, the CQC’s new online portal will be the most noticable change. Now planned for a first-wave release in the summer of 2023, this will allow providers to submit statutory notifications, make changes to their registration, and perform other functions more easily and with less impact on the CQC’s time and resources.

Strengthening Stakeholder Partnerships

One of the reasons given for the delays in the CQC’s update is to take additional ‘time to work in partnership with [stakeholders].’ Like the care businesses they regulate, the CQC would be ineffectual alone. By granting their stakeholders and partners additional time to provide input and feedback on new and changing systems, they can ensure that the other agencies they rely on to regulate the care sector are prepared and able to integrate the latest best practices into their work.

As such, when a trial run of some of the proposed systemic changes commenced in early 2022 and found the changes had an adverse effect on the affected assessment teams, this gave the CQC incentive to pause and reassess the pace of implementation to better consider their partners and care providers.

The review which led to the development of the new approach identified the importance of ensuring all buyers, providers and stakeholders in health & social care are kept on the same page as a critical priority. Since the new regulatory approach so strongly emphasises the integration of professionals from different care and healthcare sectors, it is especially important that the CQC’s new systems and processes facilitate effective communication and information-sharing across the organisation.

To hinder the existing relationships and partnerships which underpin the CQC’s regulatory activities would be to beleaguer operations in a care environment the CQC itself has described as ‘gridlocked,’ and as such, it is crucial the CQC are confident in their new approach before it is fully implemented. In the meantime, care providers can only wait for further communication and continue to strengthen their knowledge, operational practices, and supporting documents such as policies and statements of purpose, to ensure they are compliant and ready to work alongside the CQC in the coming months.

Here at ClouDoc, we can provide your business with high-quality policies and other documents designed to keep your business on track and CQC-compliant. All of our policies are comprehensive and up-to-date, and our online document management system allows you to edit and download your policies in popular file formats including .doc and .pdf. Find out how ClouDoc can take the worry out of maintaining a great suite of operational documents by calling the team today on 0330 808 0050!