In December 2023, CQC commissioned Ipsos to undertake an evaluation of splitting the previous role of inspector into the 2 new separate roles of assessor and inspector.
This was influenced by CQC’s 2021 strategy and formed part of a broader strategic shift towards a more data-driven and risk-based approach to regulating health and social care services in England. Operationally, the assessor role was intended to focus on remote evidence collation and planning assessment activities, and the inspector role was designed to focus on on-site evidence gathering. Together, the roles would be responsible for an overall effective assessment of quality and risk.
The evaluation was commissioned to understand whether the role split was achieving what it was intended to do and to support decisions about the roles going forward.The evaluation also supports CQC’s response to 2 recommendations from the Listening, learning, responding to concerns (LLRC) review around the roles.
CQC made the decision to revert to the single inspector role in August 2024, supported by interim evaluation findings.
The final report from the evaluation has now been completed. It concluded that:
Splitting the role of the inspection workforce into assessors and inspectors has faced significant delivery challenges and did not deliver the expected outcomes. These delivery challenges relate to:
- The lack of a clear case for making the change, which meant it could not be clearly communicated. This meant assumptions about how the role split would work were not tested, and the staff affected did not feel consulted.
- Delivering the change, over a relatively short space of time, in a very challenging organisational context, with resourcing gaps and other major change initiatives (facing their own challenges), which affected the role split.
- Some significant issues with the design of the role split, which affected the experience of many assessors and inspectors.
CQC is considering the findings as part of its re-development of the inspector role.
There are other notable findings and recommendations in the Ipsos report, some of which are well-timed to directly inform elements of our improvement work in response to the findings from the recent reviews from Dr Penny Dash and Professor Sir Mike Richards, as well as wider findings about how we manage change.