The Care Quality Commission (CQC) was been given new responsibility under the Health and Care Act 2022 to assess integrated care systems (ICSs) and to assure local authorities (LAs). A key part of CQC’s assessments will focus on how local authorities and systems are encouraging and enabling people to speak up, showing how they are listening to their communities and taking action based on what they hear.
Good engagement is a critical foundation for improving services, building trust, and ensuring that people’s voices shape decisions and health and social care systems have a great opportunity to coordinate and enable that. Yet, too often, good practice remains the exception, siloed in individual teams or regions.
CQC wanted to go beyond desk based research to learn from experts about what good public engagement looks like to meaningfully assess health and social care providers’ engagement. And how to build this into their approach.
Our involvement
Involve collaborated with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to deliver a programme of research which supported them to understand what public engagement good practice looks like for health and care systems. We also identified how the CQC can meaningfully assess the engagement work done by those organisations. This is an important opportunity for good engagement practice to be pioneered and embedded at a regulatory level. This has the potential to have a significant impact on the work which health and care systems do to engage with people at a local level on issues which significantly impact their lives.
This multi-faceted research included literature reviews, workshops, working with a team of expert advisors, interviews with experts across CQC and the systems as well as interviews with people who have lived experience of navigating health and care systems. This innovative approach is designed to ensure the regulatory work of the CQC is directly informed by the lived experience of people navigating health and care systems.
Findings
The multiple strands of this research were pulled together into a research report which outlines eight key principles that underpin high-quality engagement in health and care systems and can guide CQC assessment.
- Strong leadership is essential, as it helps embed engagement into the system’s way of working.
- Engagement should have a clear purpose. This helps public input lead to meaningful change.
- Engagement should inform and improve system governance and planning.
- The methods used must be appropriate to the topic and the people involved.
- Engagement should have appropriate reach - engaging with the right people.
- Engagement should be accessible.
- Systems should learn from past engagement and keep improving their approach over time.
- Engagement must be well-organised and coordinated across the system. This avoids duplication of engagement, and maximises its impact.
These principles can be used by CQC to inform their assessment approach of health and care systems moving forward. They can also be used by health and care systems themselves to plan structured and impactful engagement which ensures that people’s voices shape key decisions to improve services and build trust. The findings from this research also sets the tone for other regulatory bodies to consider how they can meaningfully assess public engagement.
How to get in touch
For more information on how to develop high quality public engagement in health and care systems, how to meaningfully assess public engagement, or how to plan strategic engagement at the systems level, please get in touch with: [email protected].
Read more on CQC's website here.