The CQC’s New Strategy – Accelerating Improvement

Recently, the CQC released ambitions as part of their new strategy. Within this, there are 4 themes outlined:

• People and communities
• Smarter regulation
• Safety through learning
• Accelerating improvement

Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking at each theme in detail. This time, we’re focusing on accelerating improvement.

What ambitions lie under the accelerating improvement theme?

The CQC plan to use their unique position to drive improvement within both individual services and systems of care. They plan to do this by sharing priority improvement areas and enabling access to support through collaboration with services, the people who use the services, and other partners across health and care.

Collaborating for improvement

Right now, the support available to improve the quality of care varies and the CQC want to change that. By strengthening the relationships they have within local systems, the CQC will promote collaboration on improvement with a key focus on ensuring everybody has fair and equal access to care, an equally good experience, and good outcomes. They also plan to facilitate national improvement coalitions with a wide range of partners and people representing those who use services.

Making improvement happen

While primarily remaining a regulator that takes action if care is poor, the CQC want to enable better access to support that helps services make improvements.

Improvement conversations between the CQC and services will be introduced, which will include signposting to a range of resources to support services to decide for themselves the best way forward.

Based on evidence of what works, the CQC will also deliver a programme of activity to drive change, sharing good practice and examples of the factors that drive improvement.

Analysis and benchmarking data will be shared with services so they can self-assess how they’re performing against similar services and areas. Services will also need to contribute to improvement in their local area and demonstrate a culture of improvement – especially addressing inequalities in access, experiences and outcomes.

Encouraging innovation and research

Working in partnership with services and other stakeholders, the CQC pledge to develop an effective way of regulating new innovations and technology. They’ll encourage and champion innovation and technology-enabled services that result in more effective services, while also considering where the use of new technology to deliver care might not suit everyone.

Services will be encouraged to play an active part in research to improve care for all, foster innovation, and enhance experiences of care.

An approach based on evidence

Through assessments of services and local systems, the CQC will investigate the things that are most important to ensuring good quality care and use this to support improvement.

Investing in research and making better use of external evidence, they’ll gain a better understanding of the conditions that drive quality improvement, including evidence and best practice from other industries. They also pledge to embed a culture of learning and evaluation within the CQC itself to maximise impact on the quality and outcomes of care.

How does Radar Healthcare support these ambitions?

Our ambitions align with the CQC – we want to make healthcare safer. For us, it’s through our risk, quality and compliance management software. Our product compliments the CQC’s new strategy in many ways.

Learning from experiences – with Radar Healthcare, feedback from service users, family and advocates can be logged quickly and simply. Even better, automatic notifications will then send actions to the relevant staff to ensure that the concern, complaint or compliment that’s been logged is acted on.

Enabling collaboration – our software enables easier collaboration and communication between teams through features like trackable notices and automatic notifications, while also providing a central source of truth.

Digital data – especially useful to utilise alongside the CQC’s benchmarking activity, Radar Healthcare offers real-time access to your service’s digital data at the click of a button. This enables you to evidence action taken, spot trends, find efficiencies, learn lessons, and much more.

Innovation – finding new and better ways of utilising the latest technology to improve healthcare outcomes is a huge part of what we do – to benefit both patients and residents, and healthcare teams. Examples include our work with predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Listening to the experiences of our customers plays a huge role in our innovation work. We also update Radar Healthcare every two weeks, and because it’s cloud-based, you always have the latest version.

Want to find out more?

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