The Care Inspectorate have informed providers on the success of using the Core Assurances template during pilot inspections. The latest development in this journey is the introduction of core assurance inspections for adult services, following successful pilot inspections conducted in 2023 and 2024.
The inspection method remains intelligence-led, responsive, and proportionate.
What Are Core Assurance Inspections?
Core assurance inspections are designed to focus on the area’s most critical to people’s safety and wellbeing. These key areas, consistently assessed during every inspection, are essential to ensuring a service is safe, inclusive, and responsive to people’s needs, rights, and wishes. This new inspection type is the result of extensive pilot testing, which demonstrated its effectiveness in providing robust assurance that services continue to deliver high-quality care and support.
Eligibility Criteria
To ensure that core assurance inspections are applied where they can be most effective, the Care Inspectorate have established specific eligibility criteria:
- The service must have evaluations of good (4) and above across all areas under the quality framework.
- The service must have a Low or Medium Scrutiny Assessment Tool (SAT) rating.
- The previous inspection must have been evaluated (graded).
- There must be no significant concerns about the standards of care at the service.
Services meeting these criteria will undergo core assurance inspections as part of a cycle of evaluated inspections. Importantly, the inspection following a core assurance inspection will always be evaluated.
How Do Core Assurance Inspections Work?
During a core assurance inspection, the inspectors will focus only on the core assurances relevant to the specific service type. This includes observing practice, sampling documents, and speaking to individuals to understand their experiences. The feedback and experiences of those using the service will play a crucial role in confirming whether the care and support provided are responsive to their needs and promote their safety, wellbeing, and rights.
Unlike traditional inspections, core assurance inspections are not evaluated (graded) and do not validate previous evaluations. Instead, the inspection reports are shorter, summarising key findings and highlighting strengths and progress within the service.
Flexibility to Address Concerns
If an inspector identifies concerns during a core assurance inspection, they have the flexibility to change the inspection type to assess a particular area in more detail. This could result in a hybrid inspection or a full inspection if multiple concerns are identified. In such cases, the relevant quality indicators will be evaluated (graded) to reflect the current situation.
Maintaining Transparency and Accountability
The error response and action plan process remains unchanged, ensuring continuity and accountability. Additionally, inspection reports will continue to be published on the service’s page on the Care Inspectorate website within established timeframes, maintaining transparency for all stakeholders.
How QCS Can Support You
At QCS, we provide tools to enable services to self-evaluate by asking:
- How are we doing?
- How do we know?
- What are we going to do now?
QCS provides:
A complete suite of QCS Policies and Procedures
- QCS Mock Inspections that help test readiness and demonstrate effective governance.
- Key audits requested by the regulator which supports staff to measure outcomes.
- QCS Feedback Surveys for service users, relatives, staff and visiting professionals, all aligned with the Health and Social Care Standards
- A Core Assurance Checklist for staff to use to self-evaluate the service and measure compliance.
- Lyra, our AI technology that gives staff instant, practical guidance based on your own policies.
Conclusion
Personally, it is an excellent concise tool; by focusing on the most critical areas for safety and wellbeing, the audit can provide robust assurance and respond effectively to any potential concerns.
The core assurance checklist will support staff to evaluate all areas within the service and highlight any shortfalls in specific areas. The staff can then delve deeper into that area to understand why the outcome is not as good as it should be. A robust action plan will ensure all areas of development have an accountable person who will action within an agreed timeframe.
For more information on core assurance inspections and other inspection types, please visit the Care Inspectorate website.
