The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has 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.
CQC wants 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 is collaborating with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to deliver a programme of research which will support them to understand what public engagement good practice looks like for health and care systems. We will also identify 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.
A key stage in this research will be a three-level participatory action research programme where 10 experts by experience will initially be interviewed. Each of these 10 people will nominate two more people to be interviewed about their experiences for the second and third round of interviews. We will do this by asking the initial 10 interviewees to nominate a person, organisation or group of people who they consider most sighted and least sighted in system-level engagement.
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.
Involve is working with the CQC, an Expert Team and 30 Experts by Experience to collaboratively produce:
- an engagement good practice guide
- a set of recommendations for CQC’s assessment work,
- a comprehensive report of learnings and findings.
What is next?
We are currently planning a set of research workshops in order to:
- identify what engagement is already done well in regulatory spaces
- identify what good could look like for CQC and develop our research questions for the desk based research and participatory action research
- make a plan about how to develop our findings into usable outputs for CQC
After those steps we will take forward the participatory action research and following analysis. The final outputs will then be produced in February 2025.