We work with others to conduct research where it meets with our purpose and priorities.
We do this to make sure we use the best expertise and get the best value for our research projects.
Our areas of research
The research we conduct helps us to:
- understand what makes a good service and how we can help providers improve
- become a smarter and more flexible regulator
- check and understand our impact
We share what we find. This is to help drive improvement in health and care and make sure all parts of the system are using the same evidence base.
Ways we work with others
- We help fund research with other organisations where we have shared priorities
- We encourage and influence the research priorities of others
- We collaborate with academics and partners on their research
- We commission organisations to undertake research
- We involve the public, and groups that represent people, in our research planning and projects
Work with us
Email researchandevaluation@cqc.org.uk for more information about our research or to work with us.
Our research priorities
These are our current priority areas of research:
Safety through learning
Safety in health and care is a key concern for us because it is consistently the area of poorest performance in our assessments. We want services to have stronger safety cultures focused on learning, improving expertise, and listening and acting on people’s experiences.
Our research will help us to understand what good safety cultures need to look like. We want to understand the conditions that support health and social care providers and systems to improve safety cultures, including how we can help influence this.
Inequalities in care
We are committed to help tackle inequalities in health and care, pushing for equality of access, experiences and outcomes, and checking how local systems address inequalities and understand the needs of their local populations.
Our research will identify what works when addressing inequalities. It will focus on how we better capture inequalities in care. It will help us detect poor care in settings where people are unable to speak up for themselves and are more likely to be failed by a poor culture.
System working and joined up care
We have new powers to assess integrated care systems and to check how local authorities are performing against their responsibilities for adult social care.
Our research will explore the conditions that support health and social care systems to work well and improve quality. It will look at what effective regulation looks like in system context, and how we can drive improvement in integrated care systems to ensure joined up care.
Accelerating improvement
We are committed to drive improvements across individual services and systems of care. We want to spotlight priority areas that need to improve and enable access to support.
Our research will look at what a good improvement culture looks like, and how to effectively assess them. We want to understand how we can encourage improvement in different circumstances. Our research will help us to identify gaps in improvement support and how we can best facilitate coalitions to help fill them.
Assessing quality of services
We want to regulate in a more dynamic way. We will give up-to-date and high-quality information and ratings, with a focus on risk and where care is poor.
Our new single assessment framework supports ongoing assessment of providers using a range of methods, rather than relying on a set schedule of onsite inspection visits.
Our research will help us to look at the impact of our new model on provider quality. It will help us understand the effectiveness of the different methods we use to assess quality of services and identify risks to people. What we learn will help us make sure that we are applying the new model in the most effective ways.
CQC as an effective learning organisation
We always look for ways to become a more effective learning organisation. We embed a culture of learning in everything we do. Research can help us see ways in which we can make further improvements to the ways we learn and change.
We will use research to help us understand how well we are delivering on our role and purpose. What we find out will help us develop future strategies and ways of working, and support our people, processes and culture.
Working with us
Email researchandevaluation@cqc.org.uk for more information or to work with us.