CQC’s impact on the quality of care: An assessment of CQC’s contribution, and suggestions for improvement

This report was commissioned by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) as part of the evaluation of CQC’s five-year strategy ‘Shaping the Future’, published in May 2016. It aims to provide an in-depth assessment of the relationship between CQC’s regulatory approach, and improvement in quality of health and social care. This includes looking at how CQC works with provider organisations and other system partners involved in health and social care. The report builds on existing evidence about CQC’s impact on quality, and takes this one-step further, by recognising more explicitly how CQC’s contribution interacts with other influencers on quality.

The report is structured as follows. The first section summarises eight impact mechanisms, or levers for improvement, identified by previous research, which CQC has found helpful in thinking about different ways to support improvement. The next section details the extent of the evidence available, and the methods used in this project that were used to produce additional evidence. The following three sections describe what is now known about each of the three priority topics, in the form of a theory of change that shows how, subject to certain conditions, CQC activities can lever provider outcomes that lead to impact. The next section presents a general framework of these conditions for impact, which complements the eight mechanisms framework. The final sections draw out recommendations for action and further research, and give an overall conclusion