Understand your CQC self-assessment

What a CQC self-assessment is, how it's structured around the CQC's five key questions, and how it compares to your official CQC rating.

Who this is for: Managers (Quality Managers, Directors of Nursing). Frontline staff who complete a CQC assessment will find the steps in Complete and submit an assessment. 

The short version

A CQC self-assessment is a way to assess your own service against the same framework the Care Quality Commission uses, before the regulator does. You answer questions across the CQC's five key areas, with guidance and tips built in, and Tendable turns your answers into a compliance score and a rating. It's how you see where you stand, and where to improve, in the CQC's own language.

It works just like any other assessment in Tendable. The difference is the framing: the questions, the score, and the report are all organised the way the CQC thinks, so the result lines up with how you'll actually be inspected.

The five key questions

Your CQC assessment is built around the CQC's five key questions. Every question you answer sits under one of them, and your results are grouped the same way, so you can see at a glance which areas are strong and which need work:

• Safe
• Effective
• Caring
• Responsive
• Well-Led

How you're rated

A CQC self-assessment uses the CQC's own four ratings rather than the general score bands you'll see on other assessments:

Your result also shows an Overall Compliance Score as a percentage, and a rating for each of the five key questions, so you can pinpoint exactly where to focus.

The four steps

Completing a CQC self-assessment follows four simple steps. You already have the tools for each one in Tendable, so this is really a map of where each step lives:

1. Introduction to CQC. Get to know the process and check your organisation's details before you start.
2. Conduct the assessment. Answer the questions under the five key areas, using the guidance and tips on each one. This is the normal way of completing an assessment, covered in Complete and submit an assessment.
3. Review and submit. Check your responses, then submit your CQC self-assessment.
4. View your report. Open the full result to see your compliance score, your rating for each key question, and where to improve. This is covered in Review the results of a completed assessment.

If your organisation only uses CQC and hasn't started yet, your dashboard shows these four steps to guide you in. Once you've made a start, they drop away.

Your self-assessment vs your official CQC report

This is the part worth understanding clearly, because two different things sit side by side.

If your organisation uses CQC, your dashboard shows a Latest CQC Report card with your official rating and a link to the published report. The point of the self-assessment is to let you compare the two: to see how your own view of the service measures up to the official picture, and to close any gaps before your next inspection.

A few things to know

• You can't edit the CQC questions. The CQC assessment content is maintained by Tendable so it stays aligned with the framework. If you think something needs changing, contact Tendable.
• Anyone on your team can complete it. Completing a CQC assessment works exactly like any other assessment, so frontline staff can fill it in, save drafts, and submit. See Complete and submit an assessment.
• It rolls up like everything else. A CQC self-assessment done at one unit feeds your reports and dashboard alongside the rest, scoped to the units you can see.

Related articles

• Complete and submit an assessment
• Review the results of a completed assessment
• Assessment reports and dashboard
• Find and pick up a draft