In January 2023, we published our response to winter pressures. This involved adjusting our regulatory activity until the end of March 2023 to enable health and social care staff to carry on providing safe, high-quality care over winter months in the face of existing pressures.
We will always act in the best interests of people who use services. So, while it’s appropriate to recognise the need for providers to focus on delivering care, we will always balance this with our responsibility to check that people’s care is still safe.
These are our plans from 1 April 2023.
Registration
We will:
- Prioritise applications from new services that will add capacity to help the current challenges in health and social care.
- Continue our rigorous approach to registering services for people with a learning disability and/or autistic people in line with our Right Support, Right Care, Right Culture guidance.
Hospital services
We will:
- Respond to new and emerging information of concern in NHS organisations, including inspecting core services and the well-led key question. This includes NHS acute hospitals, ambulance, community health and NHS 111 services. We’ll also prioritise services with inherent risk including unrated locations and locations we haven’t yet inspected.
- Continue to inspect mental health services and independent health providers, and carry out Mental Health Act (MHA) monitoring visits as planned.
- Continue our national programme of inspections in maternity services.
Primary medical services
GP providers: including NHS and independent sector providers working with the NHS, out-of-hours, NHS 111 and urgent care services
We will:
- Respond to new and emerging information of concern.
- Prioritise inspections of services where there is inherent risk, including those in special measures, services rated as inadequate or requires improvement, newly registered services, and inspections to follow up enforcement action.
- Continue our monitoring calls with GP providers.
Dental and other primary medical services
We will:
- Continue our inspections and monitoring activity.
Adult social care services
We will:
- Continue to inspect and monitor both residential services and services in the community as planned, prioritising services where there is new and emerging information of concern.
- Continue our programme of inspections to reflect improvement to help create more capacity. So far, we’ve completed over 530 inspections, which has created capacity in over 70 residential care services.
Across all sectors we will prioritise inspections of services for people with a learning disability and autistic people where we've not received updated information in the last 12 months or we haven't inspected for 3 or more years.
We will continue to develop the next steps in delivering our strategy. This includes our approach to local authority and integrated care system assessments, which we published recently. We’ll share an update on implementing our new regulatory approach in the coming weeks.