Working with you

Page last updated: 17 December 2024

Published: 13 November 2024


In this section, you can see the latest opportunities to get involved in our improvement work and what we have been engaging on.

We can only deliver effective regulation by developing our improvements in equal partnership with people who use services, health and social care providers and stakeholders.

We will work in partnership to design better ways of working and test ideas for improvements. Importantly, we will make sure we listen and act on your feedback. Read more about recent work in this area in a blog from Director of Engagement, Chris Day.

Ratings characteristics

We’ve heard that there’s a need for more detailed guidance to describe the specific characteristics of the quality of care in a service under each of our 4 ratings: outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate. We are therefore co-designing a new set of ratings characteristics.

For providers:

For organisations that represent people:

For Local Healthwatch:

Changing how we use scoring in assessments

In response to feedback, we are considering making changes to:

  • how we use an existing rating for a provider to generate new scores
  • the levels at which we score
  • how our teams apply professional judgement to decide a rating.

If you would like to get involved with this work, keep checking here.

Provider handbook

We’ve started developing a new handbook for providers, which will explain clearly how we carry out our assessments and what to expect from us. Through workshops, one-to-one conversations and surveys, we’ve had feedback from over 1,800 people on how the handbook should look and what it needs to cover. Thank you to everyone who’s engaged with us on this so far.