If you manage a care home, senior living housing, or any other type of adult social care in England, then you’ll need to know about The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) updated methodology for inspecting care providers.

They’ve already begun rolling out many of these changes with ‘early adopters’ and plan to finish implementing them in 2023 for all care providers, so it’s best to be prepared for these changes and know what’s coming.

CQC will continue to use the four-point rating scale of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, and Inadequate to grade a care provider’s services. The safe, effective, care, responsive, and well-led five key questions will also remain the same.

Whilst a few things are staying the same, a lot is changing for CQC; to make their auditing process more dynamic, they’re changing from having three different assessment frameworks to a singular assessment framework. Originally set to be rolled out fully in April 2023, this date is not fully confirmed and may change.

They’re also retiring the KLOEs, KLOE prompts and rating characteristics to be replaced by a set of topic areas and quality statements for the five key questions already established to expand on these questions and provide more detail for an accurate rating.

Change 3 is probably the biggest change, with CQC now not needing to physically visit your establishment to reassess it. Instead, they’re going to be relying on evidence submitted by you, contact with people using your service, conversations with people running/managing your care home, and more. CQC believes this will make sure their assessment doesn’t become outdated and makes their auditing more flexible.

The fourth change CQC is going to be implementing is that you won’t have one allocated inspector anymore, rather you’ll have an allocated team which includes inspectors and assessors specialising in hospitals, primary care, or social care.

The final change of CQC’s new and improved auditing strategy is that the factual accuracy challenges will be changing and renamed as ‘Review and submit further evidence’, not much has been said on this just yet, but we’re sure CQC will provide more information soon.

CQC has stated that they’re not trying to rush everything out in one go, the changes you see will be slow and gradual, so you’ll have time to adjust and prepare. You’ll need to make sure you’re prepared for the six evidence categories the CQC will be judging care providers on, these include:

  • People’s experience of health and care services
  • Feedback from staff and leaders
  • Feedback from partners
  • Observation
  • Processes
  • Outcomes

Find out more on the CQC website.

Here at Barons, we work with care providers to make sure their contract furniture and interiors are complying with industry standards. Whilst you’re getting everything ready for the new inspection procedures, we’re always here to make sure your interiors are ready for 2023, simply contact us and we can help with furnishing your care home or senior living housing. The highest quality care home furniture from Barons.