The Care Quality Commission's commitment to personalised care

I first started working with Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) and Making It Real as part of the Quality Matters strategy. Specifically, I was working with other partners to deliver an approach to information sharing that would reduce the duplication, inefficiency and lack of join-up around people’s needs.

I felt strongly then, as I do now, that the only way to do this was to enshrine what people say matters to them at the heart of quality oversight systems in health and social care – just as it needs to underpin individual relationships and interactions. It is too easy to draft lofty strategies and devise metrics in a way that ignores the fundamental need for personalised care and to lose sight of the individual.

Making It Real offers the golden thread, the call to action, the unifying principles that can steer the health and social care system on the right course, ensuring that care delivery and oversight are bound together around the principles of personalisation. Its power lies in its authenticity, wrought from true and genuine co-production, and from its simplicity. 

This is why CQC’s single assessment framework (opens new window) for health and social care providers, local authorities and integrated care systems is built around the “I” statements from Making It Real. One of the cornerstones of our strategy is a focus on the needs and experiences of people and communities. The “I” statements offer a powerful means of empowerment for people and give CQC assessment teams a clear structure for conversations with people, to understand how their experience lines up with what Making It Real says. 

Building the “I” statements into our framework sends a powerful message to the system and encourages providers and systems to seek to understand how their organisations are delivering against these expectations. It also means their strategies and metrics can, and must be, always pinned back to what they mean for people who draw upon care and support. 

This is a great first step but there is much more to do and CQC is keen to continue working with TLAP and the National Co-production Advisory Group (NCAG) so we can make our regulation and oversight work “real”. We want to work in partnership with people who draw upon care and support to understand how we can best put the “I” statements to use so that we truly understand people’s experiences and how this plays out across communities. This charges our judgements and reports with genuine power to leverage improvements in practice and in national policy. This is how we can play our part in ensuring everyone gets the considerate, caring and person-centred care and support that they have every right to expect.