Our priorities and plans for the next two years

We have published our business plan for 2014/15 to 2015/16, which sets out how we will make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care, and encourage them to improve.

In 2013/14, we began to make significant changes to how we monitor, inspect and regulate health and adult social care services across England.

We have started this already by:

• introducing tougher registration checks.
• appointing Chief Inspectors of Adult Social Care, General Practice, and Hospitals who are developing specialist and expert-led inspections based on what matters most to those who use services.
• making better use of evidence (including views from the public, those who work in care services and our partners) to drive our regulatory activities.

Our business plan

Our business plan, published today, outlines our priorities and what we will achieve by March 2016.

We will:

• put people’s views at the heart of everything we do, improve how we listen to people who use services, the public, and staff providing care.
• introduce the new approach to how we monitor, inspect, regulate and take action, and work with other regulators and partner organisations.
• support our staff to deliver our inspection, monitoring and regulation, by building a new open, transparent culture and managing our resources effectively and efficiently.

The business plan sets out key milestones for the organisation, including our Consultation with the public and our partners on our proposed 'new approach' to monitoring and inspection, which will run until 4 June.

We will continue to publish updates of our Intelligent monitoring of acute NHS trusts every quarter, with the first reports for other services (including mental health, community health, GP practices, out-of-hours primary care, and residential and community-based adult social care) to be available from October 2014.

Subject to legislation, in October 2014, we will also introduce the Fit and proper persons test for directors or equivalent managers in organisations that provide care, and make a Duty of candour a requirement at registration. This will allow us to be certain that providers will offer safe, caring, effective, responsive and well-led services.

By January 2016, we will have rated every NHS trust. We will begin to rate adult social care services and GP practices from October 2014 and will have completed this by March 2016. Services will be rated as Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate, making our judgements clearer than ever before. This will encourage services to improve and help people to choose care for themselves and their loved ones.