How we will roll out our new assessments

Over the coming months, we will gradually roll out our new single assessment framework to all providers in England.

The point at which your services move into this new model will be decided by where they are located. This roll out will start on 21 November in our South region.

We will continue to assess your service using our existing processes and priorities until the roll out reaches region it is in.

Once the roll out reaches the region your service is in, we will use our new framework to assess your service. These assessments will be either:

• planned
• responsive (where we’ve received concerning information).

Your first assessments under the new framework will produce scores for your service based on your existing ratings.

If your service has not been inspected before, the first assessment will normally cover all the quality statements.

Frequency of assessment

We will regularly review how well the new single assessment framework is working and the timescales involved until the end of June 2024. We will learn from feedback we receive from the providers we assess under the new framework.

We will then decide new frequencies of assessment for each sector using:

• what we have learned from the first 6 months
• our view of regulatory risk
• issues affecting the health and care systems.

We will have a risk informed approach and we will decide the order of our planned assessments of providers based on the level of risk.

Once the new frequencies are decided, we will publish a more detailed schedule for planned assessments. This will include a date by when we will have updated all ratings for all providers. This will signal the end of our transition period. We expect to publish this information at the start of July 2024.

Focus of our assessments

When we set out our detailed schedule for planned assessments, we will also define a set of priority quality statements for each type of service. We will typically assess these quality statements in each assessment but we will be flexible depending on the circumstances.

We will determine the specific quality statements for each type of service nationally. We will base these on findings from profiling of services to determine:

• where there are risks to people using services
• where services may have improved.

We plan to set the priorities and review them on an annual basis.

For roll out, we will be using a preliminary set of priorities for each type of service. We will review our findings, including provider feedback, to determine which priorities we will set for each service.

Over the winter period, we are also carrying out work to understand what GP practices are doing to try to meet demand. To better understand the experiences of both people and providers, we are carrying out a number of targeted assessments. In areas where we have introduced our single assessment framework, we will do this by assessing the Equity in access quality statement.