£4m to help councils prepare for CQC adults’ services checks
Councils in England will share £4m to help them prepare for assessments of their adult social services by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The Department of Health and Social Care is giving each of the 153 authorities a £26,730 one-off payment to help familiarise themselves with the process and effectively engage with their first assessment.
The regulator is currently testing its approach to assessing adults’ services with five authorities: Birmingham, Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Nottingham and Suffolk.
This has involved requesting information on how they are carrying out their adult social care functions and then carrying out on-site visits. The CQC has also tested how it gathers feedback from providers, people receiving services and other stakeholders, and how it involves experts by experience in its assessments.
Each of the pilot councils will receive a report of its assessment, an indicative score, of 1-4, for each of nine quality statements and an indicative overall rating (‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’), all of which will be published.
It will start its formal assessments of local authorities later this year and is currently working out which councils it will evaluate first.
The CQC expects to take two years to assess all of the 153 councils, each of which will receive an overall, single-word rating, as well as scores against the quality statements.
More on CQC assessments
Community Care Inform Adults users can find out more about CQC adults’ services assessments in this episode of our Learn on the Go podcast, featuring the regulator’s director of adult social care, Mary Cridge, and Amanda Stride, deputy director for delivery of local authority assessments.
You will discover what how frontline practitioners will be involved in the process, how local circumstances will be taken into account and what expertise CQC staff will bring to assessments.