The independent regulator of health
and social care in England

Update from CQC

1 March 2024

A regular update for providers and professionals working in healthcare services

Our new assessment approach: Assessing the well-led key question for NHS trusts

Two healthcare workers talking with text overlaid 'The world of health and social care is changing. So are we'.

As a part of introducing our new approach, we plan to start work on well-led assessments for NHS trusts which have been developed in collaboration with NHS England.

We will use our new assessment framework to align with our broader work and use the quality statements under the well-led key question.

Alongside this we are also introducing changes to how we rate NHS trusts which were part of a 2021 consultation. This set out proposals to simplify ratings for NHS trusts by publishing a single rating at the overall trust level. This would focus on the culture and leadership of an organisation, as well as the services where people receive care.

For NHS Trusts, our initial focus will be on service-level assessments. Quality at core service level is important to inform a holistic view of quality at trust level. Updating our service-level view of quality will allow us to focus on risks to patients and enable us to reflect a broad and up-to-date overall view of quality in our trust-level assessment and rating.

We anticipate trust-level assessments will begin in the coming months. We will update the guidance for trusts on our website shortly.

Our new provider portal is available for everyone from 11 March

In just over two weeks all providers registered with CQC will be able to create an account on our new provider portal.

We'd previously advised that our new portal would be available for all providers from 27 February. To ensure we give providers the best experience we are moving our launch date to 11 March

From 11 March if you have a role registered with CQC you can use your email address associated with your CQC registration to create an account on our new portal.

Our new portal will offer a better experience when submitting statutory notifications and completing some registration actions.

Until 11 March you can continue using our existing provider portal and submitting notifications via email.

Here's what to do to get ready for these changes:

• Make sure all the contact details we hold for your organisation are correct (you'll need to sign up to the new portal using an email address we have on record)
• Watch the introduction to our new provider portal

Maternity survey 2023 results published

Photo image of a baby in a plastic cot.

We've published the results of our 2023 maternity survey.

The survey looked at the experiences of women and other pregnant people who had a live birth in early 2023.

Women and other pregnant people who gave birth between 1 and 28 February 2023 (and January if a trust did not have a minimum of 300 eligible births in February) were invited to take part in the survey. Responses were received from 25,515 women and people who had recently given birth - a response rate of 41%.

The findings indicate some aspects of care have improved in the past year, but many maternity care experiences are still less positive than they were five years ago.

At a national level the 2023 maternity survey shows that people's experiences of care have deteriorated in the last 5 years. However, results relative to 2022 show signs of improvement in many areas. Of the 54 evaluative questions compared year on year, between 2023 and 2022, 38 showed significant improvement, including all questions in the area of antenatal care.

Update to notification on the outcome of a deprivation of liberty application

Photo image of a desk with a laptop and open notebook, with a pair of glasses and a pen on top.

We have now updated the form that health and social care providers should use to notify us of the outcome of an application to deprive a person of their liberty. Providers must notify CQC as soon as they know the outcome of an application, this includes Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) applications and applications made to the Court of Protection.

The updated form now includes an additional field prompting providers to specify the date on which the outcome of the application was received or the date of its withdrawal. Please ensure that any locally stored copies of the notification form are updated to reflect this latest change, when applicable.

We have also updated the notification form in our new CQC portal, for those organisations that have been invited to use this so far.

 Nursing and Midwifery Council temporary register closing 31 March 

Photo image of a newborn baby holding the finger of an adult hand.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council’s Covid-19 temporary register will close permanently on 31 March 2024. 

Thousands of people stepped forward to support essential health and care services during the pandemic by returning to nursing and midwifery practice with temporary registration. Their contribution made a vital difference to people’s lives. 

Professionals will not be able to practise with temporary registration after the end of March 2024. The NMC is encouraging everyone on the temporary register who wishes to continue practising as a nurse or midwife after 31 March to apply to move to the permanent register – the deadline for this is 14 March. 

Share for Better Care - Our new campaign launches soon

Text at the top of the image reads: "#ShareForBetterCare", under text an image of a nurse talking to a elderly woman in a wheelchair, right-hand side of the image text reads in a speech bubble: "Together we can improve health and adult social care". Right-hand corner text reads: Care Quality Commission

In the coming weeks we will be launching our new campaign 'Share for Better Care' alongside Healthwatch England, the Race Equality Foundation, National Dignity Council, and the Royal Association for Deaf People.  

The campaign, which aims to increase the range and volume of care experiences that people share with us, builds on the success of our Because We All Care campaign which we ran between 2020 until 2023. 

The Share for Better Care campaign centres around research and audience insight and focuses on engaging people whose voices are seldom heard, especially people from 

• people in minority ethnic groups  
• Autistic people and people with a learning disability 
• Disabled people with physical or sensory impairments 
• lower-income groups. 

We will provide a campaign toolkit for you to help support the campaign. 

If you’d like to get involved by sharing a story about the importance of feedback where you work – please get in touch! 

Other news

• We have reordered the guidance section on our website. The changes that we have made are mainly in response to feedback that we have received from providers. There is no new content as part of this work. The main source of information and guidance for providers, local authorities and integrated care systems is now a new Guidance and regulation landing page. You'll find it in the menu at the top of our site. We have also made it easier to download key sections as PDF files. This is in response to providers telling us they wanted to be able to access information on our new assessments all in one place. This work is part of an ongoing series of improvements to user journeys to make them as clear and simple as we can, and to make it easier for providers to see when guidance has been updated.
• We're working with the Point of Care Foundation and National Voices on a project supporting integrated care systems (ICSs) to reduce health inequalities. Over the next 12 months, the project, funded by the Regulators' Pioneer Fund, will be developing a framework for ICSs to self-assess how well they reduce health inequalities. ⁠Read more on our website.
• In the latest in our blog series reflecting on the learning from the Supported Living Improvement Coalition, Stefan Kallee, Senior Specialist for People with a learning disability and autistic people, looks at the first of 4 key factors that affect quality in supported living. Read the blog, and share your thoughts on our online participation platform.

Follow us on Twitter! Follow @CQCProf on Twitter to get regular updates about the work we are doing with professionals and provider organisations in England.