A practical library of the fundamental standards. Read the requirement, understand CQC’s expectations and organise evidence relevant to your service.
14 standards
Care should start with the person’s needs, preferences and intended outcomes. A useful audit follows those choices from assessment into everyday delivery, including what happens when needs change or the person disagrees with the proposed care.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Regulation 9A protects contact with people who matter to a person receiving care. The starting point is to enable visits and accompaniment, then address specific risks through proportionate arrangements that respect the person’s wishes.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Dignity is demonstrated in ordinary interactions: how staff address someone, protect their privacy, respond to distress and support independence. An audit should combine records with what people experience during care and treatment.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Consent is a continuing decision about particular care or treatment. A signed form alone does not establish that the person understood the decision, had the relevant capacity or agreed freely to what was provided.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Safe care depends on identifying risks and making controls work at the point of delivery. The strongest evidence connects a person’s risks with staff competence, medicines, equipment, infection prevention and reliable transfers between services.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Safeguarding requires prevention, prompt action and learning. An audit should test whether staff recognise abuse and improper treatment, know how to respond, and can show that the person received protection and support.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Where nutrition or hydration forms part of the service, meeting needs requires more than offering food and drink. Assessment, choice, practical assistance and timely escalation should work together for each person.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Premises and equipment should support safe, dignified care throughout their use. An audit should follow defects and maintenance actions through to resolution and check whether the environment works for the people using it.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗An effective complaints process makes it easy to raise a concern and produces a fair response and practical improvement. It should work for people who need communication support and for concerns raised informally.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Governance should show how leaders know that care is safe, how they respond when it is not, and whether their actions work. Evidence should connect frontline experience, reliable information, decisions and sustained improvement.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Staffing assurance should show that the right people are available with the right competence when care is needed. Headcount and training completion are useful inputs, but they do not establish that deployment works.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗Recruitment checks should establish suitability for the actual role, and monitoring should continue after appointment. The provider needs assurance about people engaged through agencies or other arrangements as well as its direct employees.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗The duty of candour requires openness with people receiving care. Additional steps apply after a legally defined notifiable safety incident. Assess the incident against the correct provider-specific threshold, then support the person throughout the response.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗People should be able to find the current CQC rating and understand which provider, location or activity it covers. Display arrangements need an owner and a prompt update whenever CQC publishes a new rating.
Requirement, checks & evidence ↗No matching standards. Try a broader term or choose all themes.