First local authority assessment reports published

This month we published the reports for our first formal assessments of how local authorities meet their adult social care duties.

We are required to deliver the assessments under the Health and Care Act 2022. They are part of our new formal assessment programme of all 153 local authorities in England with adult social care responsibilities, which started in December 2023.

The first 3 reports are for:

Hertfordshire County Council rated as good
London Borough of Hounslow rated as good
West Berkshire Council rated as good

We developed the assessment approach following extensive co-production with partners, care providers, stakeholders, and people who use health and social care services and their families. We also tested our approach through 5 pilot assessments carried out last year.

Exploring our community mental health survey results

Our latest community mental health survey, published last month, asked 16- and 17-year-olds about their experiences of care for the first time.

Chris Dzikiti, our Director of Mental Health, has taken a look at the results, with a focus on the new insights on child and adolescent mental health services.

The survey found that, people using child and adolescent mental health services are having worse experiences than adults across most areas of care that we cover in the questionnaire. The most prominent areas being access, quality of care, and crisis care.

We use the results from the annual survey to build an understanding of the risk and quality of services. Where survey findings provide evidence of a change to the level of quality, we use the results to inform our assessments.

Trusts use the results to identify and make the changes they need to improve the experience of people who use their services.

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Find out about roles within CQC, Healthwatch England and the Office of the National Guardian.

Current vacancies include:

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Most roles offer flexible locations with the choice to be home-based. See the individual job listings for more information.

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Building in new practices to promote anti-racism in mental health services

Chris Dzikiti, our Director of Mental Health, and Dr Jacqui Dyer, Mental Health Equalities Advisor at NHS England, have written about the work CQC and NHS England are doing to implement the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF).

The framework is the first anti-racism framework for mental health trusts and mental health service providers which sets out to improve access, experience and outcomes for people from ethnic minority groups.

The blog post looks at the progress NHS England and CQC have made in the last few months since PCREF was launched. Our two organisations have been working together to progress the roll out of the framework and formally embed its components into our work.

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CitizenLab gives you an easy way to get involved with our work and share your ideas and opinions. We use it to bring together groups of people, collect your views, conduct surveys and run quick polls.

What you tell us helps us understand the things that are important to you. We can use what we learn to make our services and information better for everyone.

The things we're working on change all the time. Join using the links below and you'll be sent an email when new information or projects are added. You can also sign in to see what activities are currently live and ready for you to take part in.

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