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GO Online: Inspection toolkit

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Equity in access

Being responsive means that your service is able to ensure the people you support can access the care, support, and treatment they need when they need it.

The following film provides a summary of this area of inspection. It can help you and your teams learn about what will be inspected and what is important to demonstrate to deliver good or outstanding care.

Introducing Equity in access

Duration 01 min 36 sec

Being responsive means that your service ensures people can access the care, support, and treatment they need when they need it.

Such care will need to be provided consistently, so you will need to have the systems and support in place to enable this to be the case. This will be reliant on effective relationships with health and social care partners, as well as the wider support in the community.

The CQC will want to know how you support people to access other services at the right time and when needed. Be prepared to explain in interviews and back up with documented evidence how this has happened.

Inspectors may also want to know how your service supports different people around reasonable adjustments, ensuring premises are accessible and responding to emergency unplanned care needs.

They’ll be looking for a responsive and flexible approach to providing care, rather than a one size fits all approach.

The CQC will interview the people you support about their experiences, as well as others from within your service but also the wider community. In residential services there may be observations too.

Expect inspectors to look at documented evidence in care plans and reviews, as well as advocacy and support records and your engagement with other services.

To learn more about how you can meet this area of CQC inspection, take a look at GO Online.

Watch the film here: https://vimeo.com/788208787

Practical examples

The examples below provide insight into how other Good or Outstanding rated services are succeeding in this area of inspection. Use the filter to choose different types of examples or select based on related prompt.

If you have an example you would like to share, please e-mail employer.engagement@skillsforcare.org.uk.

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1 example(s) found

Championing people's needs

Staff gave the CQC examples showing how they had often advocated for people, over extended periods of time so people had access to the care and the support they wanted. This included frequent championing of people's needs with health professionals and other organisations. This had resulted in measurable improvements in people's quality of life, independence, confidence and health outcomes.

Read more about the service here.

Care provider: Right at Home - Isle of Wight

  • Case study

Date published: November 2022



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