The CQC’s New Strategy – People and Communities
10 June 2021
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The CQC released their new strategy recently to give guidance on how they’re changing regulations to improve care for everyone.
The CQC have said that their updated approach strengthens their commitment to ensure health and care services follow the 5 CQC standards. Their purpose is to provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and to encourage those services to improve.
There are 4 themes outlined in the new strategy that the regulator has categorised their ambitions into. These are:
- People and communities
- Smarter regulation
- Safety through learning
- Accelerating improvement
Through every theme, the CQC have 2 core ambitions:
- Accessing local systems – providing independent assurance to the public of the quality of care in their area
- Tackling inequalities in health and care – pushing for equality of access, experiences and outcomes from health and social care services
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a blog series on each of the 4 ambition themes; first off is people and communities.
What ambitions lie under the people and communities theme?
Listening and acting
This ambition is based around how people’s voices, whether positive or negative, need to be heard and acted upon.
The CQC wants to make it easier for people, their families and advocates to give feedback, and identifying improved ways to gather experiences from a wider range of people is a big part of this. They will also change the way they record and analyse feedback so it’s easier for them to see changes in the quality of care, whether good or bad.
It will be seen as unacceptable if a service is not encouraging and enabling people to speak up. They’ll assess how they are doing this to ensure that those who are most likely to have a poorer experience of care will be heard.
People are empowered
People will always be at the centre of the quality of care. The CQC aspires to be clearer about their role as a regulator, and to actively raise public awareness of what they do. Involving people equally is important and ensuring that more people can engage with the CQC in ways which best suit them.
A good or outstanding rating is what all services should aspire to and the CQC will provide a clearer definition of what this looks like for everybody. This will be based on people’s lived experiences of care and what matters to them.
Prioritising people and communities
This ambition is all about services working together to provide smoother transitions of care.
There will be a focus on how well local systems perform against the important things that matter to people in that community. The CQC will also highlight good practice they see and share examples so that others can learn from it and adapt it to their own area.
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, but here we’ll look at the people and communities’ ambition.
Learning from experiences – Staff can easily and quickly log feedback from service users, family and advocates onto Radar Healthcare. Because our software can be used on most devices, it can be logged there and then if appropriate. This isn’t where it stops though – our software is built around improving care. That’s why it will then automatically notify and send actions to the relevant staff in the service to ensure that the complaint or compliment is acted upon.
Joining up services – We know how important it is that the communication between services is good to enable a smooth transition of patients. That’s why Radar Healthcare is interoperable with many other systems you may already have.
Evidencing action taken – The CQC need to see evidence of all these ambitions, and that’s why services need to not only follow them, but also show this via evidence. Radar Healthcare allows you to attach evidence in the form of documents or images digitally, so that they can be pulled at the click of a button to show the CQC.