This morning, the CQC has unveiled plans to change how they regulate in order to “improve care for everyone.”

The timing of their new strategy is to align with the “changing world of health and social care”, meaning they will be more flexible to manage risk and uncertainty.

It combines learning and experience from the past five years, developed using contributions from the public, service providers and all of their partners.

The CQC also aim to be quicker and more proportionate in their responses to allow health and care environments to evolve.

A main aim is to improve care for people and communities, driving their regulations through people’s needs and their experiences as opposed to how provider’s wish to carry them out.

One of the ways they will deliver a focus on people’s needs is by making it easier for people, their families and advocates to give feedback in the most “convenient and suitable ways for them whenever they want.”

The CQC also pledge to change the way they record feedback, in order to quickly identify changes in the quality of care – both good and bad.

As part of the announcement, the CQC stated:

“This new strategy strengthens our commitment to deliver our purpose: to ensure health and care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and to encourage those services to improve.

“We’ll review this strategy regularly so we can adapt to changes and be prepared for what the future holds.”

The CQC have set out their future ambitions into four themes.

These are:

• People and communities – Regulation that’s driven by people’s needs and experiences, focusing on what’s important to people and communities when they access, use and move between services.
• Smarter regulation – Smarter, more dynamic and flexible regulation that provides up-to-date and high-quality information and ratings, easier ways of working with the CQC and more proportionate responses.
• Safety through learning – Regulating for stronger safety cultures across health and care, prioritising learning and improvement and collaborating to value everyone’s perspectives.
• Accelerating improvement – Enabling health and care services and local systems to access support to help improve the quality of care where it’s needed the most.

Running through each theme will be the CQC’s core ambitions, which include looking at how care is provided in local systems and how to reduce inequalities in the sector.

To find out more about the CQC’s new strategy, visit their website here.