This blog will give you a comprehensive guide to improving its Care Quality Commission (CQC) rating. You will gain insights into how the CQC regulates health and adult social care services, understand the impact of poor ratings, and discover effective compliance strategies for improving your CQC rating.
How the CQC regulates healthcare services
The CQC monitors, inspects, and regulates health and social care services, including ambulances, care homes, clinics, community-based services, GPs, hospices, hospitals, and services delivered at home. Using a four-point scale, the CQC rates services overall as inadequate, requires improvement, good, or outstanding. These ratings are based on the cumulative percentage score of the evidence provided by a service, assessed against the CQC’s new single assessment framework.
The CQC’s new assessment framework
The CQC’s new single assessment framework is used to assess against the evidence provided by a care provider and reach an eventual rating. Key details of the CQC’s new framework and how it differs from their previous framework include:
- Key questions and ratings: as with the old framework, the CQC’s five key questions (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-Led) and 4-point rating scale remain central to assessing health and social care services across England.
- New quality statements: quality statements focus on specific topics under each key question. Expressed as ‘we statements’, they outline what is needed to deliver high-quality, person-centred care. These quality statements replace the previously used key lines of enquiry (KLOEs).
- New evidence categories: The CQC has introduced six new evidence categories to organise the information under each quality statement. These evidence categories include people’s experience of health and care services, feedback from staff and leaders, feedback from partners, observation, processes, and outcomes.
- Scoring: the CQC assesses the evidence for each evidence category on a 4-point scale: 1 (evidence shows significant shortfalls), 2 (evidence shows some shortfalls), 3 (evidence shows a good standard), and 4 (evidence shows an exceptional standard). These scores are combined and converted to percentages to give a total score for each quality statement and again for each key question. Based on the total score, providers then receive an overall rating.
- Gathering evidence: the CQC will no longer just gather evidence through on-site inspections; it will look to collect evidence continuously and can update ratings at any time. Some evidence-collection methods include using the feedback they receive from people based on their experiences and requesting evidence directly from providers.
- Change in frequency of assessments: a service’s rating will no longer be the main driver for when the next assessment is required; instead, any evidence or information received at any time by the CQC can trigger an assessment.
Potential impact of an ‘inadequate’ CQC rating
Receiving an ‘Inadequate’ or ‘Requires Improvement’ CQC rating could significantly impact your charity and potentially lead to enforcement actions if poor care is found. However, ‘requires improvement’ does not necessarily indicate poor care because some rules specified by the CQC mean a provider cannot get better than ‘requires improvement’. For example, If the key question score is within the good range, but one or more of the quality statement scores is 1, the rating is limited to ‘requires improvement’.
- Enforcement action: the CQC has extensive powers to protect the public and hold registered providers and managers accountable for poor care. If an inspection reveals a breach of regulations or a risk to individuals using your charity’s services, the CQC can take enforcement action to safeguard people from harm.
- Reputational damage: an inadequate CQC rating can significantly damage your charity’s reputation. This damage could lead potential service users to avoid your charity, causing you to lose the trust of the people you support and their families and friends. It may also result in cancelled partnerships, media scrutiny, and disconnecting from your local community.
- Impact on finances: the reputational damage caused by receiving a poor CQC rating could also financially impact your charity. The number of donations and investments could decrease due to a lack of trust in the care you provide, which would, in turn, increase the financial strain on your healthcare services.
- Staff retention: in some cases, a poor CQC rating could negatively impact staff retention, potentially leading to the loss of valuable team members. If your charity’s services are failing the people you care for, some staff may become concerned about job security or lose trust in management, leading them to make the decision to leave the organisation.
Strategies to help improve your CQC rating
With the recent changes to the CQC’s assessment framework, it’s important that your charity continuously learns, adopts best practices, and manages its compliance evidence following the new framework. Implementing effective CQC compliance strategies like the ones shown below can help ensure your charity improves its CQC rating and is always inspection-ready.
- Engage staff: motivating and engaging your staff to achieve positive outcomes as an organisation is important. Set common goals, hold regular compliance meetings, and ensure everyone knows their responsibilities to deliver the best care possible. Your staff should feel empowered to make decisions and supported in everything they do.
- Continuous learning and development: whether it’s investing in ongoing staff training or documenting the learning and outcomes from both good and bad care, these actions help improve the standard of care you provide. Your organisation can evolve and enhance its services by committing to continuous learning and linking it to relevant regulations and standards.
- Proactively collect CQC-related evidence: if you provide outstanding care, it must be well-documented. Take time to gather evidence that showcases positive feedback, patient outcomes, processes, and examples of exceptional care. Having this evidence readily available and organised by each quality statement will significantly impact the efficiency and scoring of your CQC rating.
- Invest in digital systems: it’s crucial to have reliable systems in place to ensure all your evidence is readily available in one central location. Spreadsheets and paper forms are no longer efficient for managing policies, responding to incidents, managing risk, or collecting feedback. Investing in a digital system like Vantage centralises your CQC-related evidence and facilitates real-time data analysis and reporting for continuous service improvement.
Improve your CQC rating with vantage
For over 35 years, we’ve helped more than 120 healthcare charities in the UK improve their CQC rating and ensure compliance with the latest regulations. Our software modules are designed to help healthcare charities ensure regulatory compliance by managing everything from incidents and audits to complaints and compliments in one central system.
We recently held a webinar with Jan Noble, director of innovation and quality, at St Christopher’s Hospice, showcasing how Vantage Software supports their charity’s CQC compliance. You can watch the full webinar.
In addition, our dedicated CQC compliance module allows charities to link evidence from any Vantage module and collate documented evidence against each key question, quality statement, and evidence category in one central location. This reduces the time spent collecting and gathering evidence and ensures seamless compliance with the new single assessment framework.
