What is the CQC?
What exactly is the CQC, what does CQC stand for, and what does the CQC do? Here, we’ll answer all the most important questions about the CQC, so you have all the information you need to get an outstanding CQC rating.
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What is the CQC?
First of all, let’s clarify what CQC stands for. CQC stands for Care Quality Commission, so, as you can imagine, the CQC is involved in regulating the quality of care offered by different health and social care providers.
What does the CQC do?
The CQC is an independent Government agency that’s part of the Department of Health and Social Care in the UK.
The main role of the CQC is to regulate health and adult social care providers in England. This involves carrying out inspections and assessments of providers to ensure they meet the required standards.
As well as monitoring services to ensure they’re providing high-quality care, the CQC publishes their findings in order to protect clients. The aim of the CQC is to ensure everyone receives safe, effective and compassionate care.
What are the five things the CQC look for?
There are five key areas that the CQC look into when inspecting health and social care providers. The CQC expects that any provider offers services that are:
Safe – Adequate safety standards involve maintaining the following: a safe environment; safe staffing; safe learning culture; safe systems, pathways and transitions; safeguarding; infection prevention and control; collaborative risk management, and the optimisation of medicines.
Effective – The effectiveness of a provider is based on the following aspects: assessing needs; evidence-based care and treatment; cross-team and service collaboration; outcome monitoring and improvement; consent to care, and supporting people to live healthy lives.
Caring – Delivering caring services involves: treating people as individuals and with kindness, compassion and dignity; giving people independence, choice and control; responding to people’s needs, and maintaining workforce wellbeing.
Responsive – Being a responsive provider means: delivering person-centred care; listening to people; providing information; ensuring the continuity and integration of care provision; providing equal access, experience and outcomes, and planning for the future.
Well-led – A well-led service ensures the following elements are satisfied: leaders are compassionate, capable and inclusive; the service has a shared direction and culture; people have the freedom to speak up; there is equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace; sustainable practices are used; partnerships and communities are involved, and learning, innovation and improvement are at the heart of the service.
You can read more about each of these five important areas on the official CQC key questions and quality statements page, where you’ll find ‘we’ statements that express the exact requirements that the CQC look for in each of these areas.
What ratings does the CQC give?
The CQC gives one of four ratings to a health and social care service. These four ratings are:
Outstanding – For services that are performing exceptionally well.
Good – For services that are performing well and meeting expectations.
Requires improvement – For services that are not performing as well as they should and have been given areas to improve upon.
Inadequate – For services that are performing badly and where action has been taken against the person or organisation that runs the service.
By law, CQC ratings have to be displayed somewhere that people who use the service can see them, as well as on the provider’s website if they have one.
What power does the CQC have?
The CQC has the power to take action when they find a provider is not meeting the required standards. These actions are taken to protect people from harm, to hold care providers and managers to account, and to ensure that services improve if necessary.
The severity of the action taken varies according to how serious the problems are and how these issues have affected the users of the service. Some of the measures that the CQC can take include:
Giving warning notices that state what changes the provider must make by a certain deadline;
Disallowing the provider to offer certain services, or imposing restrictions for a certain timeframe;
Placing a provider in special measures, which involves closely monitoring the provider and working with other organisations to help the provider improve in a specified timeframe;
Issuing cautions, fines or even prosecutions in cases where people are in danger or have been harmed.
Any action that the CQC has taken is made publicly available in their inspection reports.
What does the CQC mean for your business?
If you’re wondering how the CQC will impact your business, take a look through our comprehensive guides for different sectors:
And if you’re curious about how our all-in-one compliance platform can help you to pass a CQC inspection with flying colours, check out the features of our service here, or click below to organise a free demo!
