Preparing for an assessment without disrupting care

Understand the current assessment

CQC gathers evidence on site and off site. Its current guidance groups evidence into people's experiences, feedback from staff and leaders, feedback from partners, observation, processes and outcomes. What is relevant varies by service and the question being assessed.

Assessments may be planned or respond to information of concern, and their scope may expand. Published prioritisation criteria describe CQC's operational approach; they do not provide a reliable inspection date for an individual service.

Our recommendation: establish an honest starting point

Begin with the last report, current conditions, outstanding actions, recent incidents and complaints. Ask what has changed since the last assessment and which concerns remain unresolved. Identify any immediate safety action before starting a document-organisation exercise.

Agree the scope of an internal or independent review. Specify activities, locations, dates, records sampled, staff discussions and any areas that could not be examined. A desk review has different limits from observation at a service.

Build an evidence index

Use a short index that links requirements and assessment topics to current evidence. Give each item an owner, location and review date. Keep approved versions easy to distinguish from drafts and archived records.

Evidence should be retrievable by authorised people without spreading personal information across shared inboxes. A record of an audit finding and its follow-up is often more informative than a large folder of policies with no account of how they operate.

Prepare people and practical arrangements

Staff should know how to raise concerns, find relevant procedures and explain the work they actually do. Invite questions and identify where instructions are unclear. Do not script preferred answers or discourage people from describing problems.

Make arrangements for private conversations, accessible communication and access to relevant records. Consider who can respond if the registered manager is unavailable and how requests will be logged while care continues.

For on-site reviews, decide how observations will respect consent, privacy and dignity. People using the service should not have to carry the administrative burden of demonstrating the provider's readiness.

After an assessment or mock review

Separate immediate risk controls from longer-term improvement. Assign an owner and due date to each action, define acceptable completion evidence and plan a repeat check. A document update does not establish that staff practice changed.

When CQC sends a draft report, use the factual-accuracy procedure and its actual trigger date. Keep evidence from the assessment period identifiable; later improvements have a different role in the response.

Framework status

The sector frameworks published in 2026 remain draft/pilot material in the sources reviewed for this guide. Prepare against current published guidance, and maintain a separate comparison of proposed changes. A mock inspection should state which framework and version it used.

An independent exercise is a sample of evidence at a particular time. It cannot guarantee the outcome of a later CQC assessment.

Evidence checklist

• Current registration conditions and previous CQC findings.
• Open risks and actions, with immediate safety issues escalated.
• Evidence index with accountable owners and controlled versions.
• Sampling plan covering records, observation and people's experiences.
• Accessible arrangements for staff and service-user conversations.
• Request log and appropriate access controls.
• Follow-up plan with repeat checks and framework version.

Common questions

Sources and review record

1. cqc.org.uk — Assessing quality and performance↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. cqc.org.uk — Assessment↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. cqc.org.uk — 0526 update↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. cqc.org.uk — 0626 update↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. cqc.org.uk — How respond↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. legislation.gov.uk — Uksi · 2014 · 2936 · regulation · 10↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. legislation.gov.uk — Uksi · 2014 · 2936 · regulation · 17 · data.html↗ (opens in a new tab)

Content version: 1 November 2026 · Next scheduled content review 1 December 2026. This is a content review date, not a monitoring service or a guarantee that a source will remain unchanged.