We’ll look at how the care provided in a local system is improving outcomes for people and reducing inequalities in their care. This means looking at how services are working together within an integrated system, as well as how systems are performing as a whole.
We’re committed to our ambition of regulating to advance equality and protect people’s Human Rights. Everyone in health and social care has a role to play in tackling the inequalities in health and care for some people. This strategy sets out our ambition for how we can help influence change.
We’re changing how we regulate to improve care for everyone.
What we’ve learned from the past five years puts us in a better position for the future. Our new strategy combines this learning and experience and we’ve developed it with valuable contributions from the public, service providers and all our partners. It means our regulation will be more relevant to the way care is now delivered, more flexible to manage risk and uncertainty, and will enable us to respond in a quicker and more proportionate way as the health and care environment continues to evolve.
This new strategy strengthens our commitment to deliver our purpose: to ensure health and care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and to encourage those services to improve. Our strategy is purposefully ambitious, and to implement it we will need to work closely with others to make it a reality. We’ll review this strategy regularly so we can adapt to changes and be prepared for what the future holds.
Our purpose and our role as a regulator won’t change – but how we work will be different.
We set out our ambitions under four themes
- People and communities:
- Smarter regulation:
- Safety through learning:
- Accelerating improvement: E
We’ll look at how the care provided in a local system is improving outcomes for people and reducing inequalities in their care. This means looking at how services are working together within an integrated system, as well as how systems are performing as a whole.
Core ambitions
Running through each theme are two core ambitions:
- Assessing 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
We have a baseline understanding of quality across health and social care. But we know that the quality of care can vary from day to day. We’ll use our regulatory powers in a smarter, more proportionate and consistent way to make the right decisions and take the right action.
- Our assessments of quality will be different. On-site inspections are a vital part of our performance assessments and essential to observe the care people receive. But they are not the only way to assess quality: we want to move away from relying on a set schedule of inspections to a more flexible, targeted approach. To do this, we’ll use all our regulatory methods, tools and techniques to assess quality.
- We’ll build stronger relationships with services and with local systems. This includes having ongoing conversations about quality, which will give us a better insight and enable us to tailor our approach to be more proportionate.
- We’ll visit when there’s a clear need to do so. For example, this could be when we’re responding to risk, where we only have limited data or we need specific information, where we need to speak to people using the service face-to-face, or to ensure that our view of quality is reliable. For some types of service, we’ll need to visit more often to observe care. Our continuous insight and monitoring activity mean that rather than spending time looking at paperwork when we’re on site, we’ll be able to make the most of our time – we’ll have better conversations with people who live in or use the service, and their families and advocates, and more time to talk with staff.
- We’ll build digital platforms that will better integrate the data we hold, which will enable us to interpret data in a more consistent way. We’ll use innovative analysis, artificial intelligence and data science techniques proactively to support robust and proportionate decision-making, based on the best information available.
