Assessing quality and performance

Some types of service are exempt from CQC’s legal duty to give a rating. These include:

• primary dental services
• children’s homes
• sexual assault referral centres
• blood and transplant services
• hyperbaric oxygen therapy services
• medical laboratories
• adult prisons, youth offending institutions and immigration removal centres

Our approach to assessing non-rated services is generally consistent with our approach to services that receive a rating using our single assessment framework. Assessments will be either:

• responsive (in response to information of concern)
• planned, using the evidence categories we will prioritise for each service. Planned assessments will initially focus on assessing services we have not yet assessed.

However, unlike services that we rate, there is no overall score or scoring for key questions, quality statements or evidence categories, and no overall rating.

Instead, we will provide a judgement to reflect whether a service is compliant with the regulations. Inspectors will judge each evidence category they assess as either:

• Regulations met
• Not all regulations met

They will then use these evidence category judgements to create a judgement for the quality statement they sit under, stating whether the service is meeting the regulations that are mapped to that quality statement.

• Regulations met indicates the provider is compliant with all regulations related to that quality statement.
• Not all regulations met indicates that the provider has breached one or more regulations related to that quality statement.

Those quality statement judgements then inform the overall key question judgement.

A judgement of 'not all regulations met' in any evidence category means the related quality statement and key question will also show as 'not all regulations met'.