The Care Quality Commission (CQC) oversees health and social care in England, registering providers, inspecting services, and ensuring high standards. CQC inspections involve your organisation’s day-to-day operations. While it can be stressful, even for experienced professionals, mock CQC inspections can help care providers prepare for official inspections by identifying areas for improvement. These practice runs are essential for ensuring compliance with CQC standards and improving the quality of care. By conducting mock inspections, you can refine your procedures and meet the CQC’s expectations for safety and quality. This proactive approach not only ensures compliance but also promotes continuous improvement in care services.
This blog will help you understand how to use mock CQC inspections to achieve the best possible rating and boost your confidence in view of your next CQC inspection.
What are Mock CQC Inspections?
Mock CQC inspections are optional evaluations designed to help care providers prepare for the actual CQC inspections by identifying strengths and areas for improvement within their services.
Acting as drill inspections, these are internal audits designed to mirror the official CQC inspections. They are a great tool and proactive measure for care homes, nursing homes, and other healthcare services wishing to achieve the best possible outcome at the official inspection.
These mock inspections aim to boost staff confidence, ensure compliance with regulatory standards, and foster a culture of continuous improvement, ultimately enhancing the quality of care provided to service users.
Mock inspections closely follow the structure and focus of real CQC inspections, employing the same Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOEs) that the CQC uses.
Mirroring the CQC inspection scope
The Key Questions (previously Key Lines of Enquiry – KLOE) and Quality Statements is a comprehensive framework used by the CQC to assess healthcare services in England. This framework ensures that services are evaluated consistently across five main areas:
- Is the service safe?
- Is it effective?
- Is it caring?
- Is it responsive?
- Is it well-led?
The CQC uses a 4-point scale (Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, and Inadequate) to rate healthcare providers in each of these areas. The overall rating reflects the service’s performance across all five categories.
By evaluating services against these criteria, mock inspections provide actionable insights and feedback, allowing care providers to address potential issues proactively.
Mock CQC inspections can be conducted by internal staff or an external consultancy hired for this purpose. The inspection team reviews various aspects of the care service, including but not limited to:
- Examining how care is delivered to ensure it is safe and meets patients’ needs
- Assessing whether there are enough qualified staff to ensure safe and effective care
- Checking how medicines are stored, administered, and recorded
- Ensuring mechanisms are in place to protect service users from abuse and harm
- Reviewing cleanliness and infection control and prevention measures
- Evaluating the accuracy and confidentiality of service user records
- Inspecting the safety and suitability of the physical environment and equipment
- Assessing the effectiveness of governance, leadership, and management practices
- Checking the extent to which care is tailored to meet individual needs and preferences
Why Do You Need Mock CQC Inspections?
Here’s how conducting mock CQC inspections helps care providers:
- Readiness for Real Inspections:
Mock CQC inspections mimic the structure and focus of actual CQC evaluations, employing the same KLOEs and inspection methodology. It helps you highlight and proactively address any potential issues, avoiding negative impacts on ratings. Mock CQC inspections make the actual inspection process less daunting and more manageable.
- Identifying Areas for Improvement:
Through these mock inspections, you can identify areas of improvement within your operations, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, training and excellence. These mock inspections offer valuable insights into how services can be enhanced, ensuring the delivery of safe, effective, and high-quality care.
- Staff Training and Confidence Building:
Engaging in mock CQC inspections equips staff with the knowledge and confidence needed to navigate the actual CQC inspection process successfully.
- Preventing Legal and Compliance Issues:
By aligning closely with CQC’s guidelines and principles, mock inspections act as a proactive measure to mitigate the risk of legal and compliance issues. You have an opportunity to rectify any non-compliant practices before you are subjected to enforcement actions that negatively impact your ratings and overall service.
- Achieve Higher Ratings in CQC Inspections:
Mock CQC inspections allow you to identify areas of weakness, refine processes, and implement corrective actions before facing the scrutiny of the official inspection. It helps you address deficiencies, enhance staff performance, and ensure compliance with CQC standards, leading to better outcomes and higher ratings in real inspections.
👉 Useful Resource: Inspection Checklists
To best prepare for your upcoming CQC inspection, check out our library of free healthcare audit checklist templates for care providers, including mock CQC inspection checklists.
How are Mock CQC Inspections Different From Real Inspections?
Understanding the differences between mock and real CQC inspections is crucial for care providers aiming to excel in both.
| Parameter | Mock CQC Inspection | Real CQC Inspection |
| Scheduling | Planned internal drills | Unannounced visits |
| Inspectors | Internal staff acting as inspectors | External CQC inspectors |
| Purpose | Practice and learning | Regulation |
| Frequency | Can be done regularly (e.g., quarterly) | Every 2 years or when concerns arise |
| Reporting | Internal reports for improvement plans | Public ratings on the CQC website |
| Follow-Up | Voluntary action plans and implementation | Mandatory action plans |
| Consequences | No regulatory consequences; learning opportunity | Enforcement action if standards are unmet |
How to Prepare for a CQC Inspection?
Mock CQC inspections mimic the formal CQC inspection, focusing on the CQC’s Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOEs) and inspection methodology. The primary objectives of mock CQC inspections include assessing readiness, identifying areas for improvement, enhancing staff training, and achieving higher quality care standards.
Even though mock CQC inspections will make a major portion of your CQC inspection preparations, there are still additional steps you’ll need to perform.
Here’s how care providers can prepare for CQC inspections:
1. Familiarise with the CQC Framework and Regulations
It’s essential to have a deep understanding of the CQC Framework and Regulations, including the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, CQC Fundamental Standards, and the key lines of enquiry. This knowledge will guide your CQC inspection preparation.
Moreover, you should understand the difference between the types of inspections the CQC conducts. These include comprehensive and focused inspections.
Comprehensive inspections are conducted to ensure you’re providing care that’s safe, caring, effective, responsive to your patient’s needs, and well-led. On the other hand, focused inspections are smaller in scale as compared to comprehensive but follow the same process. The CQC conducts focused inspections for two reasons, including the following:
- They’re concerned about an issue that came up during a comprehensive inspection.
- The care service provider was involved in a merger, acquisition, or takeover.
2. Conduct Regular Mock CQC Inspections and Internal Audits
Form a Mock Inspection Team
Assemble a team from various roles within your care setting, including care assistants, maintenance, and kitchen staff. This diversity ensures a comprehensive assessment from multiple perspectives. Engaging staff in this process fosters a culture of quality and collective responsibility.
Create CQC Mock Inspection Templates
Creating a comprehensive CQC mock inspection template based on the actual CQC inspection framework and KLOEs is important. The CQC mock inspection template should cover areas such as safe care and treatment, staffing, medication management, infection prevention and control, among others. It will serve as a roadmap for the inspection process, ensuring all critical areas are assessed.
Care providers can use the following CQC mock inspection templates to prepare for CQC inspections.
You can use this checklist for mock CQC inspections to prepare your facility. This comprehensive checklist allows for regular self-audits, enabling you to maintain records and evidence for actual CQC inspections.
Ensure compliance with standards and delivery of high-quality dental care services. This checklist helps you through the essential steps before, during, and after an inspection, including organising necessary documents, facilitating patient feedback, ensuring proper communication with inspectors, and using inspection findings for improvement.
When it comes to internal audits, paper or Excel checklists can quickly generate lots of paperwork and administrative overheads. Many care providers look for digital tools to simplify their internal inspection processes.
GoAudits is an all-in-one healthcare inspection app that allows you to easily digitise your internal audits and inspections to work more efficiently. Create custom checklists or use existing templates from the GoAudits healthcare checklist library. GoAudits also helps you digitise your existing internal audit checklists at no cost, to help you save time and get started immediately.
One of the UK’s leading nursing and care staff providers, Careville had to “regularly tweak the audit criteria based on new requirements from the CQC.” They also had to spend a lot of time auditing even just a small portion of their business. The main problem? They had to audit first, and then generate reports and file them.
With GoAudits, they found “A flexible platform” that they can fine-tune to match their requirements.
“The flexibility of the system is endless! Not only can I update audit checklists, but with the feature ‘Build your own template’, I was able to build documents that are not directly related to auditing, such as a Confidentiality form to be signed by new joiners. I keep thinking of new ways to use GoAudits to run our processes even more efficiently!”
Ibi Akinola, Registered Manager at Careville
Learn more: Careville went from spending half a day to just 10 minutes generating reports with GoAudits
Conduct the Mock Inspection
Use the CQC mock inspection template to thoroughly assess all operations, including staff and service user interactions, premises and equipment safety, and governance. This step involves observing, interviewing, and reviewing documents, mirroring the actual CQC inspection process.
With GoAudits, you can conduct inspections directly on any device online or offline. You can capture observations, notes, and photos with ease even if you don’t have access to the internet, data will sync automatically when you’re back online again.
Analyse Findings and Take Corrective Actions
After the mock inspection, analyse the findings to pinpoint improvement opportunities. Create an action plan detailing the issues, required actions, timeframe, and responsible individuals. Implementing these changes and monitoring progress is crucial for continuous improvement.
GoAudits’ instant reporting feature is a great time-saving tool. After conducting the mock CQC inspection, it generates detailed reports that highlight areas of non-compliance and areas for improvement. You can use these reports to analyse findings in-depth, helping to identify specific issues that need to be addressed.
Moreover, you can use the follow-up and corrective action feature to create and track action plans. It allows you to assign tasks, set deadlines, and monitor the progress of corrective actions. It will ensure that identified issues are addressed in a structured and timely manner.
GoAudits helped Northern Healthcare log and resolve 1128 issues and follow-up actions. It helped them save time and resources, reduce their response time, and improve the quality of care.
Learn more: Northern Healthcare used GoAudits to perform 150-200 daily audits in different areas with over 150 different checklists
Documentation and Staff Preparation
Make sure all necessary documentation is prepared and easily accessible. Your staff should be well-informed about the mock CQC inspection process, understanding its purpose and how it can contribute to a successful outcome.
However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Documentation can be both challenging and time-consuming, especially when it comes to retrieving important information.
Sterling Dental Group were monitoring standards manually but found that paperwork became a nuisance and required lots of work. GoAudits was an efficient and affordable solution to this problem, enabling paperless self-inspections.
“GoAudits has made our life much easier! It has allowed us to go digital, removing all the unnecessary paper. Furthermore, it has allowed us to review our standards regularly, with useful information all in one place.”
Harjhot Khambay, Director at Sterling Dental Group
Highlight Outcomes
Linking actions to outcomes is critical. Ensure that events, responses, and outcomes are meticulously documented. This not only supports compliance but also provides valuable insights into the quality of care and service improvement over time.
GoAudits’ real-time analytics feature offers insights into trends and patterns in inspection data over time. It helps track corrective actions, audit scores, and care quality over time, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for future improvements.
3. Staff Training and Development
Your staff should be well-trained and aware of their roles and responsibilities, especially in areas like risk management, health and safety, CPR, and safeguarding. Staff training is an important step in CQC inspection preparation. Thus, it must also cover how our staff should interact with inspectors and demonstrate compliance with CQC standards.
Maintain an up-to-date training matrix and support staff with ongoing training, personal development, and compliance with the latest regulations and practices. Ensure training in dealing with people with learning disabilities, autistic people, and other specific needs.
Self-audits are actually a great training and communication tool. They can help ensure that all staff are aware of the expected standards and complete the required tasks and steps in due time. With a user-friendly auditing app like GoAudits in everyone’s pocket, self-audits can easily become part of the routine operations, without heavy admin work.
4. Create a Clear Leadership and Governance Structure
Creating a clear leadership and governance structure is a crucial step in CQC inspection preparations. It underpins the operational effectiveness, responsiveness, and overall leadership quality of the service, which are key areas of focus during inspections.
A well-defined leadership framework facilitates transparent decision-making processes, and accountability, and ensures that the service’s vision and values are consistently applied across all levels of the organization.
Engaging and involving staff in the preparation process not only leverages their insights for a more comprehensive self-assessment but also promotes a culture of continuous improvement and readiness for the inspection.
5. Patient Involvement, Security, and Experience
Collect feedback from your patients and staff about their experiences and use this information to inform service improvements. You can also share information about patient participation groups and ensure there are channels for both positive and negative feedback.
Moreover, conducting regular checks of your facility to ensure cleanliness, safety, and proper stock management is an important step in CQC inspection preparations. You should also have secure storage for medical supplies and ensure that patient information areas and isolation rooms are properly maintained.
Mock CQC Inspection Checklists and Templates
Wondering where to start preparing for your next CQC inspection? Download these free mock inspection checklist templates to conduct internal audits and inspections. For more efficiency, you can use an internal audit app like GoAudits.
- Mock CQC Inspection Checklist Template
- Mock CQC Dental Inspection Checklist Template
- Care Home Audit Checklist
- Care Home General Observation
- Daily Care Home Audit
- Care Home Cleaning Checklist – Daily
- Care Staff Audit
- Care Home Audit Template
- Health & Safety in Healthcare
- Weekly Care Plan Audit
- MAR/EMAR Audit
Get in touch to speak with one of our experts and understand how your organisation can benefit from digital audits.
