Using professional judgement
When making our judgements, we consider the weight of each piece of relevant evidence. Underpinning this is the experience of people who use the service, and the impact it has on them. In most cases we need to corroborate our evidence with other sources to support our findings and enable us to make a robust judgement.
When we have conflicting evidence, we will consider the weight of each piece of evidence, its source, how robust it is and which is the strongest. We may conclude that we need to gather additional evidence or specialist advice in order to make a judgement.
If we identified concerns in the inspection, we will consider the following criteria and use our professional judgement to decide whether to depart from the application of the ratings principles – particularly where we need to aggregate ratings that range from inadequate through to outstanding:
The extent and impact of the concerns on people who use services and the risk to quality and safety, taking into account the type of setting and the population group. If concerns have a very limited impact on people, it may reduce the impact on the aggregation of ratings.
Our confidence in the service to address the concerns.
What do we give a rating to?
We rate services at two levels.
- Level 1: we use our rating methodology and professional judgement to produce separate ratings for each of the five key questions.
- Level 2: we aggregate these separate ratings up to an overall location rating using the ratings principles.
