Care Quality Commission CQC Connect, 19 May 2022

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From YouTube: CQC Connect: A new strategy for the changing world of health and social care

Description

In this episode of CQC Connect, the podcast from the Care Quality Commission, we are joined by Chris Day, CQC Director of Engagement, Sarah Bickerstaffe, CQC Director of Policy and Strategy and Amanda Hutchinson, CQC Head of Policy for Regulatory Change.

They discuss CQC's new strategy, the ambitions behind it and how it'll be implemented.

You can read the full strategy on our website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/about-us/our-strategy-plans/new-strategy-changing-world-health-social-care-cqcs-strategy-2021

Listen to more podcasts from the CQC: https://soundcloud.com/carequalitycommission

Find out more information about the CQC and how it regulates health and social care in England: https://www.cqc.org.uk/

A

Welcome to cqc connect the podcast from the care quality. Commission, the world of health and social care is changing, so are we covered? 19 has made services think differently, and we are no exception. We want to make changes for more flexible and responsive regulation.

A

At the start of the year, we consulted on our new strategy and changes that will enable us to deal with ongoing challenges from the pandemic.

A

Now we are launching our new strategy, which will move us towards our ambition of being a more dynamic, proportionate and flexible regulator.

A

My name is amy key head of provider engagement here at cqc, and I'm joined today by three guests to talk about our new strategy and how we'll be implementing it.

A

I'll kick us off by asking my guests to introduce themselves and tell us a bit about their role at cqc. Sarah. Can I start with you.

B

Sure hi amy, I'm sarah bickerstaff and I'm the director of policy and strategy at cqc, so my teams have worked with others across the organization on developing this strategy and and now thinking about how we develop our policy frameworks and our ways of working to deliver. It.

A

Great. Thank you. Sarah chris.

C

Hi, I'm chris day, director of engagement at cqc, uh my team's work with um people use services with providers with parliamentarians and governments and other stakeholders to help make sure we can deliver our ambition of being a successful regulator that improves the quality of care.

A

Thanks chris and amanda.

D

Hi, I'm amanda hutchinson and I'm the head of policy for regulatory change, and my role is about developing some of the policy framework and methodology changes that we need to make to implement strategy. Brilliant.

A

Thanks everyone, so this is a really exciting week for us, as we launch our new five-year strategy. Sarah, could you talk to us about the main strategic ambitions we're hoping to deliver through this strategy.

B

Yeah sure so, as you said at the start, amy that the world is is changing and the health and care system is changing and so for for us at the regulator. Our purpose is not changing, but we know we need to do things differently to continue delivering it in this in this landscape.

B

So it's really about reinvigorating our core purpose so that we're remaining relevant, maintaining the trust and confidence of the public providers and our partners that we work with and with the with the overall ambition of of driving, positive change in the health and care system.

B

So we've set out in our in our strategy four areas that we're really going to focus on to do this, um so, firstly, people in communities. So we really want to make sure that our regulation is driven by people's needs and experience and that what we're focusing on as the regulator is what's important to people in communities.

B

That's when they access services when they use them and also increasingly as they move between them, because we know that could be um that's important to people and it can be sometimes quality issues can emerge as people move between services.

B

Our second area of focus is is what we're calling smarter regulation, which is about us, being more dynamic and flexible, being able to give more up-to-date information to people and and also for, I think, for both the public and providers, making it easier for them to work with us and being proportionate in everything that we're asking of of providers.

B

Our next theme is about safety through learning, so we want to think about how we can regulate for stronger safety cultures across health and care, and we know that when, uh when providers have a have a culture that emphasizes learning from when things go wrong, as well as things that work well, that results in safer care, and so we want to prioritize that learning and improvement and develop some some new collaborations to help us do that and then and then.

B

Finally, accelerating improvement, as I said, really is one of the most important things to all of us. Is that we're regulating in a way that drives that positive change in services and positive change, that the people who use services then experience.

B

So we want to make sure that we can enable access to support that improvement across health and care, and indeed across local systems as a whole. And increasingly we know that providers are thinking about how they're working within that system to drive improvement so working across um those four themes. Those are those are really the areas that we hope to make the biggest difference um to to make sure that we keep delivering our purpose as the health and care system changes.

A

Thanks sarah, so like personally for me, I'm really motivated by these ambitions and have been so excited to see how we've got people involved in helping shape what those ambitions look like. So I wonder now, if chris, you could talk a bit about how we shape the strategy and the role that our providers and the public played.

C

Sure so the ambitions that sarah outlined outlined in the strategy are formed from conversations with having people who use services and those involved in health and care over the last year.

C

We wanted to ensure that the ambitions in the strategy give comfort a confident voice of people using services, but also act as a beacon for providers in an increasingly complex environment so that they understood and can be driven towards what good looks like to ensure this happened wanted to build a strategy from the ground up.

C

It isn't easy during a pandemic, but I'm really proud of what the team have been able to achieve over the last year, working with in partnership with people who provide services, but also face to face with people who use services appropriately socially distanced. These conversations have helped us reach over 40 000 people and they've been and they've helped. Each one of those has helped deliver, develop our thinking over those thoughtful themes that sarah mentioned. I'm really proud of what we've been able to achieve.

A

Great thanks chris it it's really important. I think that um we're able to talk about how valuable stakeholder feedback's been in shaping what we're going to be doing clearly over um the next year, we're going to be spending a lot of time getting our future facing regulatory model in place, and I wonder if amanda you could talk to us about how we're going to be doing this.

D

Yeah sure amy um there'll be a combination of things we'll be doing to to get the new model in place.

D

So I think the first of these is is building on some of the different ways that we did things during the covid pandemic, so we'll be looking at how we build on the more monitoring base approach that we took and how we can use that to help make sure that we're targeting our activity and our inspections, where they're most needed also thinking about how do we develop the um relationships that we have with with providers, which I think, certainly during the emergency support framework that we rolled out that kind of more regular contact with our inspectors was was considered very helpful by by providers.

D

Also importantly, we need to balance the more monitoring based approach with what we learned from from walton hall and the importance of inspection in services where people are less able to speak up for themselves.

D

So, looking at the role of inspection again, how we target that, where it's needed most, how we make sure that we are consid continuing to undertake on-site visits, to gather information to understand the views of people who use services.

D

That's something else that we'll be exploring in the development work, we'll also be obviously building on what people are familiar with. So the five key questions and the scope of what we look at through our existing key lines of the inquiry.

D

That's a also part of the work that we'll be doing, but also importantly, looking at how we start to do some things differently to build on the smarter regulation theme in the strategy. So, for example, looking at how we can make more consistent judgments by introducing decision, support tools like scoring also thinking differently, about the way that we report our findings and then um last but not least.

D

Obviously, um an important part of how we are putting the future facing model in place is: is the kind co-production and engagement that we'll be doing with providers and the public? So lots of testing and developing the detail over the next year? With a view to starting to to to regulate differently from from april next year,.

A

Thanks amanda and I'm sure that will be really welcomed by providers who we know have been really keen to work with us in developing the detail of how we're going to go about this um chris. What else can we? um What else, can people expect from cqc over the next year.

C

I think amanda's been quite comprehensive there, but I think some of the things that are really interesting in that is how we bring data and information together for providers to help them and support their change, but also for the public so that they understand what they would expect.

C

I think there was something really interesting about how we work together differently as an organization, how we form views of local areas by teams across cqc working together to help working local hubs understand how services are changing not just individually but collectively, and I think by doing that, well we'll wail to better respond to how services uh change and adapt as a result of moving out of this phase of the pandemic.

C

On a very practical level, I'm I'll be delighted to see some changes to our website so that and the provider portal. So we can make information more accessible to both the public and providers again to support their understanding of what we do and support their understanding of how to drive uh change and then, lastly, I think the work that we'll do on safety and learning a learning environment.

C

I think there's a often in regulation, there's a sense of people taking action uh against things that are unsafe and that will still be a key part of our role. But I think it's really important to understand how we can how we can help organizations learn from what they learn from failure, learn from success, and that learning is an important part of our ambition. As we move forward into the next phase of the strategy.

A

Thanks chris thanks, amanda and kind of building on that point, chris about learning as we go as we move through the year, our future activities going to become clearer and we want to make sure that we are working in a way that is truly iterative and building those plans. As we go.

A

Sarah, perhaps you could give us some highlights of um what we might expect in future years and the way in which people might be involved in shaping that.

B

Yeah, I mean absolutely, we really do want to work in this way. That is iterative, and that is involving people and making improvements. As we go, it's a it's, a hugely ambitious program that we've talked through so far, so I mean, let's take one area, the um you know the insight services and the dashboards that we want to develop.

B

That is something that, over far beyond just the first year, we'll continue updating, improving and, as we work with our partners, we get better at sharing data and we get access to um to more insights that we can provide to our inspectors and other colleagues. So that is something that we'll be continuing to iterate and test over the years and also, I think, our ability to regulate across the system and we'll continue working on.

B

So you know chris talked about wanting to get in place our new ways of working internally around hubs, local networks and multi-disciplinary teams that can collaborate across a system, but as as we're putting that in place, we know that integrated care systems themselves will be getting established on a statutory footing across the country. So that is absolutely an area where we're already working closely with emerging icss and their leadership teams to understand uh the best way that we'll be able to regulate and support improvement in those systems.

B

That is something that we're going to need to continue to to work on and develop, and I suppose one one other area I'd pick out is: we want to continue focusing on making it easier for people to connect with cqc, so chris talked about the website, and but we also want to do some work on our contact center, making sure that that's as accessible as possible for people and sharing their either making queries or sharing their experiences with us, um which is absolutely a critical part of this strategy- is that we're able to gather the widest possible range of experiences of care um from individuals and that we are much better at being um responsive and letting people know how their feedback has been used within our regulation.

A

Great thanks, sarah um chris is there anything that you want to add to that.

C

No, I think the the has picked out the key points. I suppose for me this. This ability to have an ongoing dialogue with providers and people who use services about their services is critical, rather than just being about the act of inspection in a periodic sense. The ability to have that view that always on view of quality and allow providers to shape what they're doing in response to that view, I think, will be critical. I think that the game changing in terms of the quality of service for people.

A

Great thanks and amanda is there anything that you would like to add to that? um I think just that.

D

I think the strategy gives us a really great opportunity to kind of stay, take a step back and look across how all of the different components of our regulation are working together. So do we need to think differently, for example, about the way that we register providers and how that then has a flows through into how we assess them going forward lots of real opportunities here?

D

Also to think about how the information that we have about providers links up with the information that we should have about system level working and just really how we pull all of these things together to maximize our capacity to improve health and care. um Great.

A

You might have already answered my question amanda, because I wanted to follow up by asking you what you're most excited about with the new strategy.

D

So, yes, absolutely, I think it is. It is the way that that we can bring our regulation together in in the future. um The thing that particularly excites me is the future ability to look across systems and think about the quality of care that people are receiving in the communities that they live in, um to suggest improvements for for that care, and also to look at how providers are working together to tackle health inequalities. That's what really kind of excites me about about where we're heading with the strategy and the next few years, great.

A

Thanks amanda, sarah, can I ask you the same question? What are you most excited about.

B

For me, it's also about improvement, and it's about how. If we can really deliver all of our ambitions in this strategy, we will be able to make a really comprehensive offer to providers and systems to be able to reflect back to them.

B

What we know from what people have told us from our whole range of regulatory activity, if we're able to pull all of that insight together and reflect it back to provider systems and, of course, people who use services as well in a in a way that allows them to really have that kind of deep understanding of um of areas for improvement and, indeed being able to know where to look in the country for examples of improvement.

B

I think um you know. I think that cqc as a regulator has a really important role to play um in enabling that improvement, and you know, ultimately that's what I would hope to see as a result of the work we're doing with this strategy.

A

Thanks, sarah and finally, chris, what most excites you about the strategy.

C

There's a few things to me: uh one is um the fact that people's voice will be at the heart of an always-on view of quality moving forward, which I think is critical and, as both um sarah and amanda have said, I think the ability to understand how people receive services across their local area is critical.

C

I think it will help determine what parts of the country are doing well at what things, and it will also earmark where there is inequality in the way that care is provided, and I think uh cqc having that view that goes across the country. Looking at those range of services, I think will be critical to how we drive improvement. Moving forward.

A

Great well, all it leaves me to do is say, thank you, amanda, sarah and chris, and thank you so much for joining us. You can find cqc's full strategy on our website and in the episode description and we hope you'll join us next time for another episode of cqc connect.