Interim guidance on our approach to assessing integrated care systems

What our reporting will look like

When we have gathered enough required evidence across the quality statements, we will start to publish assessment reports for integrated care systems. There will be a short period between assessment and publication to provide an opportunity for the organisations within an integrated care system to carry out a factual accuracy check. For an integrated care system, we would share the draft assessment report with the Integrated Care Board and Integrated Care Partnership.

We will publish our reports on our website. They will include a short summary of the key features of the integrated care system and will focus on people’s experiences of care. We will publish our most up-to-date findings against the themes and for each quality statement. Reports will include:

• information on what people have said about their experience and how we used it in our assessments.
• narrative on areas that require improvement and areas of strength
• commentary on the progress of the integrated care system.

We will engage with people to clearly understand what different audiences need from our reports and this will influence their design.

Publishing ratings under the assessment process

We will begin publishing scores and ratings for integrated care systems once we have sufficient evidence. We will be gathering evidence and building relationships over time rather than on a single inspection.

When we publish ratings, we will publish:

• the overall rating
• the score for each theme of the assessment
• the score for each quality statement.

The scores will indicate where an integrated care system sits within a rating, showing whether it is nearer the upper or lower threshold.

We use a sampling approach to quality assure our processes and reports to check that our view of quality is reliable. If we identify anomalies, we will update our approach accordingly.

We may not update a rating on our website every time we review and update a score at quality statement level, but we will indicate that a review has taken place and make clear when this has happened. We will always update our website when a rating moves from one level to another (for example, from requires improvement to good at either quality statement, theme or overall rating level).