CQC assesses every homecare service against five key questions: is it safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led? Under the single assessment framework, those questions are broken down into quality statements, and CQC looks at a range of evidence for each one, including what people who use the service and their families say, feedback from staff and leaders, feedback from partners such as commissioners and GPs, and your own processes and records.
The agencies that find assessments least stressful are the ones that do not prepare for them at all in the usual sense. They keep their evidence current as part of everyday work. This checklist is a place to start.
1. Know your own service first
- Complete a regular self-assessment against the five key questions and be honest about the gaps.
- Keep an up-to-date statement of purpose and make sure it matches what you actually deliver.
- Review your service user guide and make sure people know how to raise a concern.
2. Safe: visits, medicines and safeguarding
- Check that every scheduled visit was delivered, and that missed or late visits were followed up and recorded.
- Review medication administration records for gaps and check that errors were reported and learned from.
- Make sure every incident and safeguarding concern is logged, with the action taken and who was told.
- Confirm that risk assessments are reviewed when a person’s needs change.
3. Effective and caring: care plans and people’s voices
- Make sure care plans are person-centred, reviewed on time and reflect what people want from their care.
- Look at visit notes: do they describe the person’s day and wellbeing, not only the tasks done?
- Gather feedback from people and their families regularly, and keep a record of what you changed as a result.
4. Well-led: your team and your governance
- Check that every care worker has a current DBS check, Right to Work evidence and up-to-date training.
- Keep supervision and spot-check records current.
- Make sure staff have read and acknowledged your key policies.
- Use audits to spot problems early, and record what you did about them.
5. Make the evidence easy to find
An assessor may ask for evidence across any of these areas. If it lives in paper files, spreadsheets and email, finding it takes time you will not have on the day. Keeping everything in one system, with dates and names attached, turns the question “can you show me?” into a few clicks.
How CEVERO Care helps: CEVERO Care gives you a compliance overview across the five key questions, a self-assessment, an incidents and safeguarding log, a policy library with staff acknowledgements, staff compliance tracking and a full audit log, alongside your rotas, care records and eMAR. Book a demo or see every feature.