CQC Announces Delays to New Adult Care Assessments

1. CQC Announces Delays to New Adult Care Assessments

2. On the 21st of December, the CQC released ‘Our revised plan and approach for transformation,’ a news post that details changes to the New Assessment Approach and delays in the rollout of new Adult Care Assessments. ClouDoc brings you the key points of this latest CQC press release and lets you know how these changes might affect your care business this year.

3. Changes to Inspections • In November 2022, the CQC released an article on how their plans would affect their day-to-day operational practices. These changes will significantly affect their inspection processes and the structure of their operational teams. • A dedicated director will supersede the deputy chief inspectors who currently head up CQC’s operational teams. An officer will now administer meaning teams 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.

4. Changes to Inspections • 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 respond more 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 now be administered within four regional ‘networks’; Northern England, Midlands, London and East of England, and South England, and will comprise several roles: • Assessors (Establish an ongoing overview of local care activities, using evidence both on- and off-site) • Assessors (Establish an ongoing overview of local care activities, using evidence both on- and off-site)

5. Changes to Inspections • 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 can 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.

6. 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. They have provided the open-ended estimate that this will be completed ‘later in 2023.’ 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. • The CQC’s new online portal will be the most noticeable change for most care providers. 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 efficiently and with less impact on the CQC’s time and resources.

7. Strengthening Stakeholder Partnerships • One reason 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 consider their partners and care providers better.

8. Strengthening Stakeholder Partnerships • 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 beleaguers operations in a caring environment the CQC itself has described as ‘gridlocked.’ As such, the CQC must be confident in its new approach before it is fully implemented. In the meantime, care providers can only wait for further communication and continue strengthening 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.

9. 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. Our Care Home 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 at 0330 808 0050!

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