The Care Quality Commission has published how it will carry out its first assessment of services using the new approach, including new services which have not yet been inspected.
Where services have an existing rating or findings about compliance, CQC will select which quality statements to look at, determined by national priorities, set by the type of service, and consideration of information held about a service.
For each of the quality statements selected, CQC will collect evidence and give a score for all the relevant evidence categories, based on the new assessment.
For the remaining quality statements, scores will be based on CQC’s previous findings using current, published ratings. Scoring will be:
- 4 for each quality statement where the key question is rated as outstanding
- 3 for each quality statement where the key question is rated as good
- 2 for each quality statement where the key question is rated as requires improvement
- 1 for each quality statement where the key question is rated as inadequate
The date of previous assessment will be stated.
There will be some exceptions, described here, where topics have been moved from one key question to another or are new to the assessment framework.
Where services have not previously been inspected, CQC will be unable to use this method of scoring, and so will normally collect evidence for all the quality statements within the first year.
The Homecare Association has raised with CQC the possibility that scoring could be based on old and out of date data, for example, where services have not been rated for five years. We have also pointed out that this system may make it difficult for services to upgrade their rating, in the short-term, and that new services are effectively being treated differently from existing services, in terms of the number of quality statements being scored.
