Our assessment framework focuses on what matters to people. We encourage people who use services, and organisations who represent them or act on their behalf, to share their experiences at any time.

We define people’s experiences as:

See how we use people's experience in our regulation.

• People using services, their families, friends and advocates are the best sources of evidence about lived experiences of care. This includes their perspective of how good their care is.
• We value people’s experiences as highly as other sources of evidence and weight them equally with other evidence categories.
• We consider the context and impact of people’s experiences in our analysis.
• If we receive feedback that people have poor experiences of care, we will always identify it as a concern. We will review further and gather more evidence. This is even if other evidence sources have not indicated any issues.
• We increase our scrutiny of, and support for, how providers and systems encourage, enable and act on feedback. This includes feedback from people who face communication barriers. We look at how they work together to improve services.

People’s experiences are a diverse and complex source of evidence. We analyse a range of sources, such as data on demographics, inequalities and frequency of use for care services.

Our assessment framework:

• sets out clearly what people should expect a good service to look like
• places people’s experiences of care at the heart of our judgements
• makes sure that gathering and responding to feedback is central to our expectations of providers and systems.