The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has launched a consultation on its draft strategy for the future regulation of care.

Writing about the draft strategy, the CQC said: “We need to make changes to the way we regulate so that it’s more relevant and has positive outcomes for everyone, as people’s expectations of care have changed. We need to be more flexible to manage risk and uncertainty. We’ve learned a lot from our response to the pandemic, and we’re using this to put us in a better place for the future and support services to keep people safe.”

The future regulatory landscape of the care sector

The CQC’s draft strategy is built on four themes that together determine the changes it wants to make:

• People and communities – regulation should be driven by people’s experiences and what they expect and need from health and care services. The draft strategy focuses on what matters to the public, and to local communities, when they access, use, and move between services.
• Smarter regulation – CQC proposed a “more flexible and dynamic” approach to regulation, with updated ratings more often, and being smarter with data means visits will be more targeted, with a sharper focus on what we need to look at.
• Safety through learning – A stronger safety cultures through learning and improvement as the primary response to safety concerns in all types of service. “When safety doesn’t improve, and services don’t learn lessons, we’ll take action to protect people.”
• Accelerating improvement – Focussing regulatory effort to “priority areas that need support the most.” This means the CQC will be looking to see “improvement within individual services, and in the way they work together as a system to make sure people get the care they need.”

Flexible Policy Making

An aspect of the draft strategy moving forward is building flexibility into the system to allow the CQC to “be as flexible as possible and adapt to changes in health and care.”  In practice, this means a move away from a rigid approach to policy making towards a more flexible approach where the CQC will review its strategy “when we need to”.