TLAP and the Care Quality Commission come together to focus on lived experience

People who draw upon care and support are the best-placed to let us know how well it’s working – and yet their voices are not always heard. Our work with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) aims to change this by making lived experience a more central part of their assessment framework.

Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) is working with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), who regulates care in England. Together we are exploring how the lived experiences of people who draw on care and support can be taken into account during the assessment of services.

Why has this work come about?

CQC has built ‘I statements’ from our Making It Real initiative into their new assessment framework (opens new window). They did this to help people understand what a good experience of care looks and feels like, to help providers know what people expect, and to help their inspection teams in assessing people’s experiences of care.

We are pleased to see Making It Real statements being recognised by CQC. The next important step in this work is developing with people who use services, providers and inspection teams how the statements will be used in practice. CQC has partnered with TLAP to develop new resources to make sure the voices of lived experience are truly heard.

Why is this work important?

Everybody should have the care and support they need to live their life their way. A fundamental way to know whether people are getting care and support that works for them is to really listen to their experiences. As the regulator of care across England, CQC plays an important role in making this happen across the country, and we believe that this collaboration will help to improve people’s experiences of care in the long term.

Jennifer Pearl, a member of the National Co-production Advisory Group who has worked with CQC on this project, said, ‘I know what good quality care looks like for me, so I think it’s really important that people like me – who need good quality care to live our lives – can feed into the inspection process and share our views. I am really pleased that CQC has worked with TLAP and, most importantly, people who draw on care and support to shape the new ways of working.’

What are we doing?

We are currently working with CQC to see how the I statements can be used to assess people’s experiences of home care. We are doing this through:

• Workshops with people with lived experience, providers, and CQC inspection and assessment teams to gather information about what people want from their home care services and how this can be evidenced for CQC assessments 

• In person workshops with people who draw on care and support

• Interviews with people with lived experience

• Co-production of a resource following the workshops to clearly show what good looks like for home care services

• Development of a test and learn process to trial the resource in practice  

We hope that CQC will then expand on this work to consider how the I statements can be used to assess other types of care.

Want to learn more about Making It Real?

Making It Real is our set of co-produced statements that describe what good care and support looks like. You can use Making It Real to better understand people’s experiences of care and support, and to spark ideas and actions that can improve lives. 

Visit makingitreal.org.uk (opens new window) to download a guide to working with Making It Real, as well as other resources.