Shaping our future in partnership with stakeholders

Chris Day, Director of Engagement at CQC talks about the approaches we are taking to implement our new strategy and transform how we’ll regulate.

Health and social care is changing, so are we

I’m always impressed by the ways health and social care providers and systems innovate to improve the quality of care they provide for people. Some of these changes have been driven or accelerated by the pandemic. Some, like the move to more integrated ways of working, are longer term changes to ensure health and care systems meet the needs of the people they serve.

As health and social care systems change, we recognise that CQC needs to change as well. In May 2021 we launched a new strategy which set out our ambitions for regulation in the future.

Since May we’ve been working to make these ambitions a reality. Key to this work is developing a new regulatory model and single assessment framework, changing the way we assess providers and introducing more system level assessments. Alongside these activities, we are developing new ways to collect, use and share information from the public, providers and wider system partners.

To get this work right we need to develop our new ways of working in collaboration with the public, with people who work in health and social care and other stakeholders.

Putting coproduction at the heart

I’m fully committed to ensuring that genuine coproduction is at the heart of developing new policy, methodology and ways of working.

In practice, that means engaging people in different ways at different times to make sure they’re able to influence at every stage of the development of our work. I’m proud of the fact that we chose not to launch a fully formed proposal for how we’ll work in the future. But rather have developed our future approach in partnership with stakeholders — beginning with a starting ambition and adapting in response to the feedback we receive.

This means being open to supportive and critical feedback. We’ll continue to develop our future approach this way — engaging through public surveys, coproduction webinars, focus groups, stakeholder reference groups, user research and through our digital engagement platform CitizenLab.

Make it relevant, make it meaningful

Key to getting this approach right is sharing the right information at the right time. That means sharing clear and accessible information that focusses on what our potential changes mean for people who use services, people who work in health and social care and others.

It also means we’re starting small, with specific elements of our new approach and growing from there to show how the whole new regulatory model may work.

I also recognise that taking a genuine coproduction approach can be challenging at times, even frustrating. It means we can’t always share a complete picture of what our future model will look like because we’re committed to developing that in partnership with others.

However we will always share the latest information on our future approach as soon as we are able to. And we’ll show how feedback through coproduction has shaped the development of our approach and final outcomes.

What we’ve heard

I wanted to share some of the conversations we’ve had recently. In particular in engagement with our External Strategic Advisory Group. This forum brings together stakeholders that represent the public, providers, health and social care professionals and other system partners. We talk to them regularly about the development of our future approach.

Recently, we’ve spoken to them about how we’re developing our new regulatory approach, our approach to system level assessments — collecting and using data from across the system and how we use people’s experiences of care in our monitoring and assessment of providers.

I’m grateful for the feedback they gave us on these topics including valuable insight on:

• How we can work with system partners to share data / intelligence
• The types of information that will best help us to assess quality
• The types of data we hold that will be most useful to share publicly
• How to maintain and strengthen good relationships with providers
• How to coordinate our work within and across systems
• How our new approach can address inequalities and unmet need This feedback has helped shape our work in these areas.

What next

We’ll continue to engage widely to develop and coproduce our future approach. This will also include starting to test our new regulatory model with providers and stakeholders. If you’d like to be involved in this engagement then make sure you’re signed up to receive our bulletins.

Over the next few months we’ll also start to share more information about what our future approach will look like, when we’ll start to use it and what this will mean for the public and providers. We’ll do this gradually, iteratively and in phases.

As we’re doing this it’s important to me that we share this information in a way that’s right for you. So we’ll be working hard to ensure the content we develop meets your needs and is available in the formats that you find most accessible. Look out for more information in our bulletins, in future blogs, podcasts and videos.

As we start to implement new approaches in the future, you can be assured that these won’t be static and result in an inability to respond to the latest changes in health and social care. We’ll listen to feedback and we’ll continue to engage so we can continue to improve and make sure we’re developing the best outcomes for people who use services and for those people who provide health and social care.