The Care Quality Commissions’ (CQC) new strategy outlines their ambition to regulate services driven by people’s needs and experiences, focusing on what’s important to people and communities when they access, use and move between services.

They also strive to tackle inequalities in health and care and need to ensure that they are hearing from those population groups experiencing the greatest health inequalities and most likely to face barriers in accessing care and poorer health outcomes.

They recognise the need to work especially hard to encourage and enable people from seldom heard groups and people who are vulnerable due to their circumstances to share their experiences through trusted local intermediaries, in a way that is accessible to them.

To do this CQC needs to encourage and enable a continuous flow of intelligence (positive and negative) about people’s experiences of care at named health and social care services, outside of planned inspection activity.

CQC contracted with HWLincs to deliver this public engagement approach within Lincolnshire with the learning disability and autism communities.  The focus of the work will be to test and understand the best formats to engage with these communities which best suits them and to make recommendations to CQC as to how this can be achieved locally and scaled up across England.

Face to face engagement, online surveys, webinars are all part of the methodology for engagement with the focus on being how we support the needs of those who are sharing there stories.  HWLincs finally produced a final report to detail the findings and share observations and recommendations.