Health and Social Care Standards

The Standards are underpinned by five principles; dignity and respect, compassion, be included, responsive care and support and wellbeing.

The Standards are based on five headline outcomes:

• I experience high quality care and support that is right for me.

• I am fully involved in all decisions about my care and support.

• I have confidence in the people who support and care for me.

• I have confidence in the organisation providing my care and support.

• I experience a high quality environment if the organisation provides the premises.

We are changing the way we inspect the quality of care and support to reflect the new Health and Social Care Standards. Since the 1 April implementation date, we have been referring to these new standards in all of our scrutiny and improvement work. We are now developing new inspection frameworks and models which reflect the ambition of the new standards, and the focus on experiences and outcomes. We have committed to doing this incrementally, and with the involvement of people who experience, provide, and commission care and support. We want our approaches to support robust, evidence based self-evaluation and will work during 2018/19 to build the capacity for this.

From July 2018, we introduced a new framework for inspections of care homes for older people, and used this framework on our inspections. You can find a copy of this, and more detail about how we will use it here. The framework is designed for use in self-evaluation, inspection, and improvement support, and draws heavily on the new Health and Social Care Standards. It uses a series of key questions and quality indicators to help prompt reflection on the quality of care provided. It provides illustrations of what we believe constitutes ‘very good’ and ’weak’ care and support in relation to each quality indicator, relevant to care homes for older people. The quality framework also provides information about how we gather evidence on an inspection, and gives links to relevant improvement resources. We will evaluate quality using the existing six point scale from unsatisfactory to excellent, and we will report publicly on what we find.

We are strongly committed to developing similar frameworks and approaches for other settings, and are commencing the development of these now. These will be tailored to specific settings, so they can really describe the experiences and outcomes we expect to see for people experiencing care, reflecting the ambition of the Health and Care Standards.

For more information, videos and other supporting materials can be found here.