Interim guidance on our approach to assessing integrated care systems

A scoring framework to support consistent judgements

To support the transparency and consistency of our judgements, we intend to introduce scoring into our assessment process for integrated care systems. This approach will be consistent with our assessments of registered providers.

For each quality statement in the assessment framework, we will assess the ‘required evidence’ in the evidence categories and assign a score to the quality statement.

The scoring framework to support decisions is:

1   =   Evidence shows significant shortfalls

2   =   Evidence shows some shortfalls

3   =   Evidence shows a good standard

4   =   Evidence shows an exceptional standard

Developing scores and ratings

When we assess evidence, we assign a score to the relevant quality statement. The scores for the quality statements aggregate to ultimately produce the ratings, and an overall score. All evidence categories and quality statements are weighted equally.

This approach makes clear the type of evidence that we have used to reach decisions.

The overall rating will use our 4-point rating scale. The score will indicate a more detailed position within the rating scale. For example, if an integrated care system was rated as good, the score will tell us if this is in the upper threshold of good, nearing outstanding. Similarly, if an integrated care system was rated as requires improvement, the score would tell us if it was at the lower or higher threshold, so nearer to inadequate or good. We will work with the integrated care systems, the Department of Health and Social Care and other stakeholders on the best way to publish our findings.

For integrated care systems, we will combine the evidence category scores to give a score for each quality statement, which then collectively give a score for each theme and an overall score and rating.