Safety in Adult Social Care Research

Purpose and objectives

This project seeks to understand and describe

This piece of work will support CQC in inspecting and monitoring safety more effectively in adult social care and support providers to understand what CQC will be looking at when assessing safety performance.

We would expect the research activity to address the following questions:-

1. What frameworks/best practice/guidance exists in the ASC sector on safety systems and processes including those to identify, report, investigate and learn from safety concerns? Where they exist, how extensively are they used?
2. How consistently is safety assessed and managed across the ASC sector? Does this differ depending on the type of service and/or size, and business model of the provider?
3. Are there any international models or frameworks for assessing and managing safety in ASC and if so, what are their key features and how effective are these?
4. What is the ASC sector understanding of “safety” and “safeguarding”? To what extent does it distinguish between the two in practice?
5. To the extent that there is blurring of distinctions between approaches to managing safety and safeguarding, what would be the risks and benefits of developing more distinct approaches and processes – e.g for identifying, reporting, investigating and learning from safety incidents and safeguarding incidents?
6. Using the research what approaches can be suggested on how CQC could identify risk and measure safety in ASC e.g. through intelligent monitoring, provider returns or during inspections?