What are the main ways we use information?
From listening to your views and experiences of care to analysing data about services, information and evidence play a vital part in our work.
We're constantly improving the way we use information and evidence. The most important ways we use information in our work are:
- We gather and analyse information when services register, through continual monitoring and when we inspect them, and we listen to your views and experiences of care.
- We look at potential changes in quality by bringing together relevant information about a provider.
- We look at data and use it to monitor services continuously. It helps us to make sure the decisions we make are based on sound evidence.
- We make sure the information and data we hold is of a high quality and is as complete as possible. We will continue to find ways to make our information and data easily available to people we work with.
- We handle the information we hold carefully, making sure that the privacy, dignity and rights of people who use care services – and others whose information we have access to – are respected and protected.
- We publish our inspection reports and ratings to give you clear information, help you make choices and to help services improve.
Listening to people who use services
We listen to and act on experiences of care in our inspections and throughout our work. We monitor changes in quality by bringing together what people who use services are telling us, knowledge from our inspections and data from our partners.
- Our registration and inspection teams include Experts by Experience – people who have personal experience of care.
- We work with local Healthwatch and we look at information we receive from other local groups to make sure we're listening to your views and opinions.
- We encourage you to share your views and experiences of care – both good and bad.
- We use data gathered nationally by other organisations, including:
- patient survey data
- information from the NHS
- patient opinion feedback
- the NHS Friends and Family Test.
- We form partnerships with charities and other organisations to gather feedback from people who contact them about their experiences of care.
We share our monitoring data with partners appropriately to improve efficiency and reduce duplicate requests for information from services.
Continuous monitoring
Information we use to monitor services includes:
- Data on safety and quality, which helps us to plan our assessment and inspection activity.
- Information about people's experiences of care and the views of their families.
- Comments from staff and carers, specifically safeguarding and whistleblowing alerts.
- Other information that we collect directly from care providers.
Using data to monitor services
The data we look at
The data we analyse is about things that indicate whether the care people are receiving is safe, effective, caring, responsive to their needs and well-led. This includes waiting times, mortality rates and feedback from staff and people who use services.
We look at different data in different sectors.
What it tells us
All the information we gather from different sources tells us whether the quality of care has either improved or deteriorated. How often we assess will depend on the information we receive and the evidence we collect. Assessments will be either:
- planned
- responsive (where we’ve received concerning information).
We gather evidence both on site and off site to make an assessment. On-site activity remains really important, and we expect to use our time visiting services in a more targeted way. The information we gather helps to focus our activity where evidence suggests that there are risks to people using services or where services may have improved.
We will update ratings where we find changes. We use unannounced inspections to focus on areas where our evidence suggests risk is greatest.
After we complete an assessment, we will use a scoring system to produce a rating for a service. For some types of service, there is no legal requirement for CQC to give a rating.
By targeting our assessments in this way, we will recognise improvement and identify and act on poor care.