During any change journey, it is vital to listen and respond to feedback.

As we’ve been developing our new regulatory approach and planning for roll-out, we’ve invited our colleagues, providers and people who use services to share their views with us. We’re excited to share benefits with providers and support you with new ways of working.

Developing guidance in partnership

During the summer, we’ve heard from providers that they need more guidance before they feel ready to adopt new ways of working. We’re still developing our guidance and we’ll continue to involve providers in that development through our digital engagement platform, CitizenLab, as well as our webinar series and other engagement events over the coming months. Look out for opportunities in our regular email newsletters.

You’ve already helped us so much, and today we are publishing the next part of our guidance about the types of evidence we’ll look for as part of assessing each quality statement. We wanted to share this now, so you have time to read and understand it.

We will work with providers to help finalise the guidance on our new assessments before we roll it out. As we finalise this, we’ll share it with all providers to give them a reasonable period of notice before they are directly affected. Our current estimate for the majority of providers is around 8 weeks between publishing our final guidance and starting our new assessment approach.

Our intention is to go live with our new assessments with a small group of providers in the South network first, ahead of full roll-out. We’ll do that only when the necessary guidance is in place, but those first providers might have slightly less notice between when we publish the guidance and the live assessments. We will work closely with those providers to mitigate that shorter notice. We aim to share more information on our plans for this shortly, but expect the first of those live assessments to begin in mid-November.

Maintaining a view of quality

While we’re developing the remainder of our guidance with you, and until we can start assessing in the new way, we’ll continue with other contact, conversations and reviews.

We will also continue to inspect in response to risk and take action where appropriate.

Making progress

Our new provider portal, and improvements to how we process notifications, is now in final testing and will be available shortly. We’ll be rolling the portal out slowly, starting with a small group of providers, and carrying out some important testing before opening this up to others.

To stay up-to-date with progress, make sure you keep an eye out for our regular bulletins, webinars and supporting videos.

Finally, we want to assure you that we are not going to suddenly ask you to operate in a fundamentally different way. As you can see from the information on our website, the 5 key questions continue to underpin our work. We are seeking to reflect your feedback about the need for us to provide greater consistency, simpler processes, easier contact methods, more transparency, and the ability to change a rating more quickly when you improve.

South of England

The South refers to services registered in these counties: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire..