To deliver our purpose, we need to make some urgent improvements to our assessment approach that will enable us to complete more and better quality assessments.
Why we are changing
Assessments using our current scoring approach take too long and mean we are not able to complete assessments in a timely way or complete enough assessments to give an up-to-date view of quality for the public and providers.
We have also heard that our scoring model is too complex and hard to understand.
The following changes will mean we will be able to deliver more assessments, at a faster pace. Supporting us to better reflect quality across health and social care.
What we are changing
From 2 December, we are rolling out some key changes to our assessment approach.
We will stop scoring and reporting at evidence category level for provider assessments that we start after this date. This will mean that we will start reporting and scoring at quality statement level.
We will still use our published evidence categories to guide what we look at during assessments and to produce a judgement for individual quality statements. Our ambition remains to deliver regulation that is driven by people’s experiences of care.
We will update our guidance to provide more information on what this change means for our assessments of providers.
This change does not apply to our assessments of local authorities.
We are also making some changes to the internal technology systems we use to carry out assessments. These changes won’t have a direct impact on the public or providers, but will help our staff to carry out more assessments at a quicker pace.
These are interim changes that we’ll review in early 2025.
What this will mean for providers and the public
You will see changes in draft and final reports from assessments that we start after 2 December. These reports will not include scores at evidence category level, and will only show scores for quality statements.
We will no longer report on scores at evidence category level. We will continue to use evidence categories to direct how we assess individual quality statements but only start scoring at quality statement level.
What next
Alongside this immediate change, we are also developing further improvements to how we work for early 2025. These include:
- Providing clearer descriptions of what we look for at different levels of quality under each of our 4 ratings
- Developing a new guidance handbook for providers
- Developing ways to produce an accurate rating while using a selected number of quality statements
- Stopping the use of existing ratings to produce new scores
- Developing how we use professional judgement when rating services
It’s important that these changes are developed in partnership with the public, providers and our colleagues, so we will be engaging on the detail over the next 3 months and will only make the changes when we have completed that work. This will include consultation planned for 2025.