Care Quality Commission

Under the Single Assessment Framework scoring used to be at evidence category level, and this was used to come to a score for each Quality Statement, and then each Quality Statement score was used to come to a rating for each Key Question and then ultimately the overall rating for the service.

With up to 6 evidence categories and 34 Quality Statements there could have been up to 204 scores used to come to a judgement. It has been agreed that this system was far too complicated, difficult to understand for both CQC and providers use and didn’t provide a fair or robust judgement of services.

As such, from December 2024 CQC scrapped the use of evidence categories to come to a judgement on a Quality Statement and have reverted to using inspectors’ professional skills and knowledge to assess a wide range of evidence to come to a score for a Quality Statement, without allocating it to an evidence category.

However, this has caused a problem for CQC as their IT system was built to use the scores allocated to evidence categories to produce a score for a Quality Statement. As such CQC have had to develop a ‘workaround’ while the technology is adapted to allow scores to be independently given at Quality Statement level.

This ‘workaround’ essentially means that the score given to the Quality Statement must be given to an evidence category – so every evidence category score will just be the same as the Score the Inspector has allocated to the Quality Statement. You just need to ignore the scoring given at evidence category level, as it will always be led by the score the inspector has already given at Quality Statements level.

Finally in draft reports you may see reference to the fact that scores have been ‘moderated’, again this is nothing to worry about, and is purely another IT legacy issue to allow inspectors to allocate a score to a Quality Statement that reflects their professional judgement rather than the narrow, process driven way that the current IT system dictates.

This will be temporary until the IT system is fixed. It is frustrating for you and them and is the result of investing in an IT system that wasn’t tested in practical terms and isn’t responsive to rapid changes in the ways inspections are conducted, and reports are published.