Give your views on our draft sector-specific assessment frameworks

Let us know what you think

This survey follows on from our consultation ‘Better regulation, better care’. We have considered the responses and listened to feedback, which showed overwhelming support for our proposal to introduce separate assessment frameworks that are more specific and relevant to the health and care sectors that we regulate.

We have therefore developed 4 draft sector-specific assessment frameworks. Read our background to assessment frameworks.

There are separate assessment frameworks for each of the following sectors:

• adult social care
• mental health care
• primary care and community services
• hospitals (secondary and specialist care)

We now need your feedback on the draft assessment frameworks to help us refine them. This will directly inform the next versions to help ensure they are practical, proportionate and focused on improving outcomes for people who use services.

Each draft framework is built from the same components:

• the 5 key questions (is the service safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led)
• key lines of enquiry framed as structured questions that describe what we will look for on our assessments – these replace the current quality statements
• rating characteristics that describe what outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate care looks like in each sector
• I statements drawn from the Making It Real framework co-produced by Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) together with a wide range of partners and people with lived experience of health and care services. These ensure that people’s lived experience remains central to our assessments and set out what good care feels like from the perspective of those using services.

In online and in-person engagement sessions, we asked what people thought good quality care looks like to enable us to identify and develop characteristics that describe care under a rating of good. Using this, we then developed specific characteristics of care under each level of rating for each sector framework.

The rating characteristics are a new and important part of the assessment frameworks and provide the basis on which we make judgements about care. They are designed to help the public and providers to understand what good care looks like, support our inspectors to make consistent judgements about quality, and recognise the important differences between sectors.

The consultation feedback also showed strong agreement with removing scoring from our assessment methodology and making rating judgements directly at key question level, so the rating characteristics will therefore support this change.

How to respond to this survey

Once you have read the background and definition of the assessment framework, you can give us your feedback and views using the link below. The form has 8 questions.

You need to view the draft assessment frameworks on our website before you start.

Please submit your responses by 5pm on 12 June.