Change is an uncertain thing by design. We grow and improve through change, but that does not mean we always know exactly how. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is in a transitional period. A period whose challenges reverberate across the social care sector and beyond, raising hopes, but also questions. We recently hosted a CQC webinar where Chris Day, CQC’s Director of Engagement, answered the most prominent questions submitted by Nourish Care users. As put to him by our Director of Customer Success, Ruth Norman.  

We learned of an organisation adapting to the needs of its community and building for the future. An organisation with enough self-awareness to recognise the mistakes it’s made, and the vision to correct them in the continuing pursuit of their person-centred, technology-enabled, ambitions.  

“The next steps of this journey for us is very much working with you so you and our colleagues who inspect have a really clear and collective understanding of what good looks like.” – Chris Day, Director of Engagement, CQC 

The CQC webinar was exclusively for Nourish users. We selected some of Chris Day’s most prominent insights below.  

If you are interested in joining Nourish and working with regulators, commissioners and communities to build the future of social care together, book a demo today. 

At the heart of the new inspection framework is a realisation. The CQC felt they were too focused on processes, not outcomes. The new approach focuses on outcomes, on the voice of the people and using the service and the staff supporting them. ‘I’ statements are designed to reflect what an individual expects from their service, and the ‘We’ statements illustrate how a service responds to those expectations. The CQC are eager to connect the dots between services with their new assessment framework. However, they acknowledge the work needed to refine how ratings translate across the 18 sectors they regulate and want to work with providers to address this. 

Chris highlighted the importance of re-establishing the link between providers and their local inspectors. He admitted the CQC overlooked the importance of these relationships when establishing the single assessment framework. The quality of these local relationships is crucial for building trust. They will launch a series of pilot programmes for local inspector hubs in October 2024 and will share further information for attendees through Nourish. The CQC want to give people the ability to talk to their inspectors without an inspection. To know and understand their inspectors through continued engagement. To build trust at a local level and share best practise.   

“A manifestation of care planning reality,” said Chris.  The biggest delineator of ratings comes down to the extent providers understand the issues they face. Including those outside their control, and crucially, what they are doing to address them. They want providers to show the relationship between the care planning, the training, the way observations are taken and the way support is given. It is important to give your team the confidence to connect data and information with people’s lived experiences. And the comprehension to explain those connections to inspectors. It’s not about providing a wealth of raw data. Care plans are more than a box-ticking exercise. How you tell the narrative story matters.  

Specifically, during our CQC webinar, Chris advised providers to use ‘edge’ or ‘outlier’ cases. Rather than a uniform overview of similar care plans. The new framework focuses on how a care plan reflects how you deliver care. How the person utilising support and their family experiences the care and how the specifics of your service’s context shape the care. Show the journey.  

First and foremost, it is important to understand the portal has several different functions. Chris spoke about the registration, notification and assessment functions during our CQC webinar. Fundamentally, the technology behind the portal isn’t working in the way they wanted. While notifications are functioning and will continue to do so, registration and factual accuracy checks are not. The CQC recognise how important it is to keep these services running, and so will be reverting to the pre-portal approach for both. Those who have completed or nearly completed their registration through the portal will not need to redo it in the old fashion, while those earlier in the process will be supported to switch methods. They are building out their registration team to expedite this process. Further information will be shared with Nourish users shortly.  

“I think we’ve let you down in terms of the time it takes to process registrations and take forward inspections,” said Chris. Addressing this swiftly is the key motivator for moving back to the older systems. They will be able to increase the number of registrations and inspections they conduct by returning to systems they are familiar with.  

The CQC looks to divide registrations between complex and ‘transactional’ needs, to help resolve simpler registration requests quickly. They will still use the quality statements for inspections, rather than key lines of enquiry, with the older process. “We know we had higher productivity pre covid with the inspection approach we took,” explained Chris. 

 The priority of inspections going forward for the CQC is ‘to form a view of the quality that someone who is going to use that service can expect’. They are currently undertaking modelling for inspection timelines and rates and are expecting to finish the modelling in November. Once the modelling is completed the CQC will share it with Nourish and providers. 

Naturally there was apprehension in our chat about the order of urgency of inspections. While the priority will be on addressing known harm, uninspected newly registered services and services ranked poorly who have had time to improve, Chris acknowledges the need to focus on inspections that show the positive changes providers have implemented. They are growing teams and their use of clinical experts to increase their inspection capacity. 

For those uncertain about how long this will take it is important to remember, when key lines of enquiry were first brought in, the CQC inspected every service in their charge over three years.  

Currently there are a range of experience and comfort levels with care technology in their workforce. A major part of inspector training is to ensure they understand the technology available to providers. Something they are eager to work with Nourish on developing.  Chris acknowledges the significant role technology can play in helping the CQC establish a ‘common view of quality in adult social care’.  

Data is a huge opportunity for care. Normally data is centred on the NHS. Access to real time information increases the understanding of care and service performance. Which in turn drives positive change. Bringing commonality to how data defines quality care is no easy feat, and there is a journey still to go on. However, Chris knows from previous work that data information is often at the heart of positive changes organisations have made and it has an important part to play in shaping the future of health and care. Including conversations about the long-term funding of health and care. 

As the hour drew to a close we posed a selection of questions from the session to Chris. Here is a brief overview of his responses. 

The CQC plans to review their inspection ratings in the near future. Their goal is always to triangulate data to get a full picture of the quality of a service. The primary goal being to establish these ratings as a more narrative description of the care you can inspect, rather than simply a ‘score’. 

The provider ‘handbook’ for inspections was recently approved. Over the next four to eight weeks the CQC will engage with providers to develop it. 

Understanding risk is crucial to justifying it. With specific regard to concerns over how the CQC will review potentially risky activities that increase quality of life for people drawing on support. This reiterates the need to rebuild trust between providers and inspectors Chris discussed earlier in the CQC webinar.  

Their ambition for Local Authority inspections to relate to provider inspections. The CQC are committed to providing further context for provider inspections by better understanding the worlds in which they operate.  

“That’s my ambition,” concluded Chris. “It’s not where we are at the moment, but I’d really like to do that. I’m happy to come back and talk about the Local Authority stuff moving forward.” 

The CQC are building for the future. But in order to do that they know they have to rebuild trust with the adult social care sector. There remains a great deal of work ahead of all of us to achieve the ambitions of the regulator and providers alike. Ultimately, we are all unified in our vision of better, more person-centred, care.  

Nourish are committed to working with everyone involved in the process, so we can change with confidence and drive better outcomes as a result. Join Nourish today to avail of future CQC webinars, integrated innovations and community led care technology.

Care owners understandably want to have peace of mind that everything is under control and running smoothly within their care service. The Compliance & Audits feature within Nourish can be used in a number of different ways to provide great insight into your care service depending on your individual requirements.

If you’re a hands on care owner, you may want to be able to look into detail at exactly how your care service is performing, and the ways in which it is improving people’s lives, or simply see the bottom line to understand how your care service is doing, and what needs to be done to continue to grow and improve. 

Compliance and Audits can do just that, and it can be tailored to suit the needs of your care service. Here’s just a few ways care owners can utilise this feature.

Every care service is run differently, and the flexibility of the Nourish system allows you to run things the way you want. Audits can look into both the running of the care service itself as well as the residents health and wellbeing, to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

You can choose from a bank of audits to understand specific areas, or create bespoke audits based on things that are more specific to your care service. Owners may wish to identify areas such as spending, predict CQC ratings or assess staffing needs.

Care owners can then add bespoke reports that are tailored to their needs which can assess overall quality of care being provided. They may want to report on failed admissions, GP visits or number of completed records by staff, to name just a few. 

These audits allow care owners to spot check certain areas where they may wish to improve or change, and it allows them to gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. 

Care owners are bound to be busy, and the thought of having to sit down and sift through paper reports can be daunting. With Nourish, care owners can utilise Compliance and Audits by automating the reports they need on a regular basis, and this could be as frequent as is necessary for your care service. 

Automated reports take the hassle out of manual reporting, and ensure reporting is consistent for much more accurate data in the long run. This can be incredibly beneficial when it comes to inspections. 

Care owners can then look at data at the touch of a button, in as much or little detail as they like. This is really useful for those times when you may want to simply understand the bottom line, as you can see a top level overview of different areas of your care service. 

This also means that when it comes to a CQC inspection, you can streamline the process and simply produce any reports that they may wish to see. They’ll have all the information ready to look at without the need for trawling through mountains of paperwork. 

As a care owner, having a detailed understanding of every area of your care service is key to figuring out what works well and what may need improvement, and it can be hard to see the bigger picture sometimes without a good auditing system. 

Compliance and Audits within Nourish can help to gain a better understanding of your staff and those you support through the use of the bespoke audits and automated reports. 

With clear and consistent reporting, you will then be able to analyse data at a much deeper level, and at a much faster rate than paper reporting. This feature can also be used in conjunction with Nourish Analytics, to allow you to identify trends and correlation at scale throughout your care service. This is particularly useful for big care groups who may wish to monitor and track the level of service being provided across all sites, to ensure consistency in care. 

The Nourish system is designed to work with all different types of care providers, to be as flexible as possible so that care owners can tailor it to their needs. 

Compliance and Audits is just one element of Nourish that can provide care owners with a clear view and understanding of every area of their care service, so that they can make more informed decisions in order to maintain an outstanding level of care to those they support. 

For more information on how the Nourish system can help your care service, book a demo today!