Share for Better Care: How people’s experiences drive regulation of care services

About the Share for Better Care campaign

At National Voices, we are proud to be part of the Share for Better Care campaign, launched by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Healthwatch England, in collaboration with a range of other excellent partners. The campaign aims to encourage everyone to give feedback on their experiences of care, particularly people who are more likely to experience poorer care and inequalities (for example, in access and experiences of care), who may face more barriers and are less likely to give their feedback.

It is the partnership between the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector (VCSE) and others that can help to encourage people to give feedback on their experiences of care, and the campaign aims to continue to work with the system to make sure regulated services hear and act on this feedback.

Why is it important that people share their experiences of care?

Feedback is a valuable tool, as it enables CQC to celebrate great care and identify where and how services can improve. Unfortunately, not everyone’s voice is being heard.

It is one of our core beliefs that health and care services are at their best when they are designed with and around the ambitions of disabled people, people living with health conditions and people affected by health inequalities. The voices and experiences of people accessing health and social care services are vital for making sure these services work well for everyone.

We want to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to share their experiences of care, especially people experiencing inequalities and poorer care. To do this, it is crucial to not only improve our reach but also to understand any barriers being faced that may result in these groups being underrepresented. In addition to using our platform to share the campaign, especially with our members consisting of over 200 health and care charities representing a huge range of conditions and communities, we are working with a small focus group of members to see what can be done differently, and better.

CQC has developed a toolkit to help with sharing the campaign, and individuals can also share their experiences of care via the website.

How are CQC using people’s experiences to improve care?

At CQC, we believe people using care services, their unpaid carers, families, friends and advocates are the best sources of evidence about their lived experiences of care and how good it is from their perspective. We champion this in our work and value people’s experiences as highly as other forms of information or data. We want to encourage a culture where it’s routine to give feedback about health and social care experiences. Regulation driven by people’s needs and experiences is a core strategy ambition for CQC. We have also published principles for how we use people’s experiences in our regulation.

As Interim Chief Inspector of Healthcare at CQC, the regulator of health and social care in England, one of my main priorities across all our activity is working to improve how we gather, store, analyse and use people’s experiences across our regulation.

In March, we launched Share for Better Care, a campaign to encourage more people to share experiences of health and social care, with a specific focus on people more likely to experience inequalities in access, experiences and outcomes.

We know through research a key factor in people sharing their experiences of care comes down to awareness of who we are and what we do, and we need to build trust and confidence by demonstrating how we act on feedback.

We use people’s feedback at both micro and macro levels.

Our assessment framework for regulating health and care services and local systems:

• sets out clearly what people should expect a good service to look like
• places people’s experiences of care at the heart of our judgements
• makes sure that gathering and responding to feedback is central to our expectations of providers and systems.

In the 2023/2024 business year, 1084 inspections were directly triggered by people’s experience and feedback. We continue to prioritise incorporating people’s voices and feedback into our regulatory assessment process.

State of Care, our annual assessment of health and social care in England, is driven by analysis of people’s experiences across a range of sources, including information people have shared through our online Give Feedback on Care form.

Volumes of feedback received through our Give Feedback on Care form have increased by 238% from 23,539 in 2017/18 to 79,617 in 2023/24.

To deliver high-quality care, it is vital to listen to, understand and act on the experiences and needs of people who use health and care services. This applies to those who provide and organise care services as well as to CQC as the regulator. Information from people’s experiences helps us to make better assessments of the quality of care and provide better information about them.

How to support the campaign

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram and X using the #ShareForBetterCare hashtag.

CQC has developed a stakeholder toolkit with materials to help you support the campaign.

Access the stakeholder toolkit here

For more information about the campaign, visit CQC’s website: www.cqc.org.uk/ShareForBetterCare

How people can share their care experiences

Website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/give-feedback-on-care

Deaf or Hard of Hearing and Text Relay: https://www.cqc.org.uk/contact-us/general-enquiries/get-help-contacting-us-if-youre-deaf-or-hard-hearing

Phone: 03000 616161 interpreter services available

Email: enquiries@cqc.org.uk

#ShareForBetterCare

Biographies

Jacob joined in May 2023 as Chief Executive of National Voices.

He is a committed advocate for working with people accessing health and care services and the wider public to help improve the accessibility and quality of the care they receive. He loves to combine deep qualitative insights with quantitative data to challenge traditional thinking on how to tackle policy challenges. Prior to working for National Voices, Jacob spent almost 10 years helping to build the Healthwatch network. In this time, he led successful nationwide policy influencing campaigns on a huge variety of topics, from maternal mental health services to access to NHS dentistry. He has also worked in local Government and for the British Library.

Chris Dzikiti was appointed as CQC’s Interim Chief Inspector of Healthcare in May 2024. He joined Care Quality Commission in October 2022 as Director of Mental Health, following time as a Deputy Director for National Retention programme at NHS England. Previously Chris has also worked as a Programme Director leading on mental health transformation in London.  Chris is a multiprofessional leader, registered mental health nurse and an experienced programme and project management professional with 20 years’ experience of working in healthcare transformation, delivery and commissioning.

Between 2017 and 2021, Chris was a Global Healthcare Consultant for Health Education England in India, providing technical support for Mental Health Services there. He is also a published author, having contributed a chapter on psychiatric intensive care to the book Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing – The Craft of Caring. Chris is passionate about coaching and mentoring colleagues and young people from a Global majority background.