| During any change journey it is vital to listen and respond to feedback. As we've been developing our new regulatory approach and planning for rollout, we've invited our colleagues, providers and people who use services, to share their views with us. We're excited to share benefits with providers and support you with new ways of working. Developing guidance in partnership During the summer weâve heard from providers that they need more guidance before they feel ready to adopt new ways of working. Weâre still developing our guidance and weâll continue to involve providers in that development through our digital engagement platform, Citizen Lab; our webinar series and other engagement events over the coming months. Look out for opportunities in our email newsletters. Youâve already helped us so much already, and today we are publishing the next part of our guidance, sharing information about the types of evidence weâll look for as part of assessing each quality statement. We wanted to share this now so you have time to read and understand it. We will work with providers to help finalise the guidance on our new approach to assessments before rollout. As we finalise the necessary guidance, it will be shared with all providers. We will give providers a reasonable period of notice before they are directly affected, with our current estimate for the majority of providers being in the region of eight weeks between publication of our final guidance and starting our new assessment approach. Our intention is to go live with our new approach to assessments with a small group of providers in the South network first, ahead of full rollout. Weâll do that only when the necessary guidance is in place, but those first providers might have slightly less notice between guidance publishing and the live assessments. We will work closely with those providers to mitigate that shorter notice. We are aiming to share more information on our plans for this shortly, but expect the first of those live assessments to begin in mid-November. Maintaining a view of quality While weâre developing the remainder of our provider guidance with you, and until we can start assessing in the new way, we will continue with other contact, conversations and reviews. We will also continue to inspect in response to risk and take action where appropriate. Making progress Our new provider portal, and improvements to how we process notifications, is now in final testing and will be available shortly. Weâll be rolling the portal out slowly, starting with a small group of providers, carrying out some important testing before opening up to others. To stay up to date with progress keep an eye out for our regular bulletins, webinars and supporting videos. Finally, we want to assure you that we are not going to suddenly ask you to operate in a fundamentally different way. As you can see from the information we have published on our website, the five key questions continue to underpin our work. We are seeking to reflect your feedback on us providing greater consistency, simpler processes, easier contact methods, more transparency and the ability to change a rating more quickly when you improve. This is your chance to have your say on our guidance on the types of evidence weâll look for as part of assessing each quality statement. We have grouped different types of evidence under 6 evidence categories. Each category sets out the types of evidence we look at to understand:â âthe quality of care being deliveredâ the performance against each quality statement.â This is to make our judgements more transparent and consistent.â We will make clear what we look at in our assessments by setting out the evidence categories that weâll focus on for each quality statement. We want your feedback on whether the guidance works for you. Log into Citizenlab to take the survey. If you're not already a member of CitizenLab you can register here.  This webinar is the next instalment in our transformation series. In it, we will introduce our quality statements and evidence categories, and the role they play in our new regulatory approach. The 1-hour session on Thursday 12 October, from 3 to 4pm will be led by Dave James, Head of Policy â Adult Social Care and Amanda Hutchinson, Head of Regulatory Change. It will focus on example quality statements, to explore how weâll use evidence categories to identify specific sources of evidence to use in our assessments. Alongside the full provider guidance, this webinar will give you the information you need to understand the evidence weâll use to assess each of our new quality statements. We will close registrations at 12pm on Thursday 12 October and won't be able to accept any new registrations after this. Can't make it? As the webinar will be recorded, you can watch or listen back to it when it is posted to our YouTube channel. We'll let you know when it's available.
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