Annual report and accounts 2022/23

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) was established under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England.

Our purpose

Our purpose is to make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve.

Our organisational values are:

Excellence: Meeting our challenge to be a high-performing organisation

Caring: Treating everyone with dignity and respect

Integrity: Demonstrating our passion for ‘doing the right thing’

Teamwork: Enabling us to be the best we can be

The Health and Care Act 2022 gave us a new responsibility from April 2023 to give a meaningful and independent assessment of care in a local area.

Our role

Our regulation involves:

• Registering health and adult social care providers.
• Assessing and inspecting services to check whether they are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.
• Providing independent assurance to the public of the quality of care in their area.
• Publishing our judgements and ratings for the quality of health and care services and for the performance of local authorities and integrated care systems in meeting the health and care needs of their local population.
• Enforcing the regulations by using our legal powers to take action to protect people where we identify poor care.
• Speaking independently by publishing national and regional commentary and views of the major quality issues in health and social care, and encouraging improvement by highlighting good practice.
• Protecting the rights of people in more vulnerable circumstances, including those restricted under the Mental Health Act.
• Listening to and acting on people’s experiences and involving the public and people who receive care.

How we are organised

Under our Executive Team, there are 5 areas of work:

• Regulatory Leadership
• Operations Group
• Regulatory, Customer and Corporate Operations
• Engagement, Policy and Strategy
• Technology, Data and Insight

Strategic priorities

Our Strategy from 2021 sets out 4 strategic ambitions:

1. People and communities: Regulation driven by people’s needs and experiences, focusing on what’s important to people and communities when they access, use and move between services.
2. Smarter regulation: Smarter, more dynamic and flexible regulation that provides up-to-date and high-quality information and ratings, easier ways of working with us and a more proportionate response.
3. Safety through learning: Regulating for stronger safety cultures across health and care, prioritising learning and improvement and collaborating to value everyone’s perspectives.
4. Accelerating improvement: Enabling health and care services and local systems to access support to help improve the quality of care where it’s needed most.

Running through each theme are 2 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.

Who we work with

We report to Parliament through the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

We work with other regulators, local authorities and commissioning groups, health and social care organisations, and organisations that represent, or act on behalf of, people who use services, including the Healthwatch network.

Healthwatch England, the national consumer champion for users of health and social care services, is a statutory committee of CQC’s Board.

The National Guardian’s Freedom to Speak Up Office (NGO) is jointly funded by CQC, and NHS England and Improvement. CQC’s Chief Executive has responsibility as Accounting Officer for the NGO and for Healthwatch England.