Working with others: adult social care services

Our relationships with providers, local and national organisations, and the public help us to understand peoples’ experience of care, how services are performing and what the local issues are.

We use the information we receive from them to help us to decide when and what we will inspect.

Working with the people who use services and the public

People’s experiences of care are vital to our work – we use what people tell us about their experiences of care to help us decide what and when we inspect. We encourage people who use, or have used, services to share their experiences with us. They can do this through our website, helpline and CQC’s social media outlets. People can also share their experiences through our national Tell us about your care partner charities.

People’s carers, relatives and friends and members of the public can also share their experiences of services with us.

Working with local and national organisations

We also work in partnership with a range of local and national groups. We share publicly available information with these groups and ask them to share information with us.

As well as local commissioners of services, such as local authorities or clinical commissioning groups, our inspectors and inspection managers are in regular contact with people from groups such as:

• local health and social care professionals
• local Healthwatch
• overview and scrutiny committees
• independent complaints advocacy groups
• voluntary and community sector organisations (particular those representing people whose voices are seldom heard)
• Shared Lives Panels
• independent mental health advocacy
• Independent Mental Capacity Act advocacy.

We also work with:

• Parliamentarians
• schools
• police, fire services and local medical committees
• coroners
• environmental health teams
• Office of the Public Guardian.

Read more about how we work with local and national groups.

Working with providers

We are committed to developing and maintaining an open, transparent and challenging relationship with providers. Our approach to inspection starts by looking for good practice. We want to highlight and celebrate good practice where we find it and inspire providers to strive to be outstanding and continuously improve the care they provide.

We will allocate a relationship holder to each service. In most cases this will be a local CQC inspector, though in some cases it may be an inspection manager or head of inspection. These relationship holders will develop a consistent understanding of services and will be responsible for day-to-day communication and information sharing with providers. Where we identify risks through our monitoring, relationship holders check with providers what action they are taking to address these.

Your relationship holder will carry out the inspection of your service, unless they are unavailable.

Our approach to relationship management with corporate providers

CQC inspection staff work at location level to improve the quality of care. We will allocate a corporate relationship lead to all providers with more than one location to encourage improvement from a corporate perspective. Normally, providers with:

• 2-3 locations will be allocated an inspector.
• 4-19 locations will be allocated an inspector or inspection manager.
• 20 or more locations, that are not in the Market Oversight scheme, will be allocated an inspection manager or head of inspection.

Our Market Oversight scheme assesses the financial sustainability of the most difficult to replace providers in adult social care. These providers

are already allocated a corporate relationship manager in our Corporate Provider Team.

Corporate relationship leads will oversee providers’ quality and risk profiles across their care locations, so that we can identify trends, risks and issues, and respond in a timely and coordinated way at national, regional and local levels.