The information we consider in our review

Information we have about your service

For all services, we consider:

• the current rating
• any ongoing or planned regulatory activities
• information about safeguarding, whistleblowing, incident reports (we call these statutory notifications) and whether the service has a registered manager
• feedback from people who use services and their family and friends
• national data sources where available
• other contextual information.

The type of data we use will change over time as it develops, and as clinical priorities change. We may also change the type of data we use as we learn about its effectiveness in helping us to identify where to take regulatory action.

In general practice the national data sources are ones that we use and publish after an inspection in evidence tables. We use them to identify variation (or outliers) from national average or target values.

People’s experience of care

We also consider the views of people who have used the service. Examples of where we get this information from include:

• responses to our online give feedback on care service
• enquiries to CQC
• information we receive from other agencies such as Healthwatch or local authorities.

If we don’t have up-to-date feedback, we will ask you for further information. For example, we may ask if you have a patient or user group we could contact or use our Experts by Experience programme to contact people or local groups.

We consider this information for all the services we regulate. For certain types of service, there are additional information sources.