Today (Thursday 23 October), NHS England and its partners have set out what actions the NHS should take over the next five years to make sure that everyone receives high-quality care and that their health needs are met.
Among other things, it calls for services to work more closely together, including between general practices and hospitals, health and social care, and physical and mental health, so that the NHS is truly person-centred.
As the regulator of health and adult social care services across England, we support this vision for improvement. This month, we are formally rolling out our new inspection regime, which is based on what matters most to people who use services and identifies what works well and what does not, in closer detail than ever before.
David Behan, Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission said: "Our inspections are continuing to tell us that there is too much variation in the quality and safety of health and adult social care. This is why we support the Five Year Forward View for the NHS, which sets out how the service needs to evolve, so that the needs of patients can be met and so that we can close the care gap.
"As the regulator of health and social care, our role is to use our inspections and what people tell us, to identify what is working well and why, and what does not work. We want this to drive improvement, with providers learning from the services that we rate as good and outstanding."
Last week, we published our annual State of Care report, which gave our unique perspective on the quality of more than 40,000 health and care services. We found that there is much excellent care across England but variation in quality and safety is too wide, and that by looking at our inspection reports on outstanding and good care, other services can learn and improve.
Download the Five Year Forward View for the NHS
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Download the report
You can download the Five Year Forward View on the NHS England website.