The Care Quality Comission (CQC) has issued handbooks on care quality assessment as the chief inspector admitted parts of the care industry were 'awful'.
Speaking on the BBC's Breakfast Programme Andrea Sutcliffe chief inspector of adult social care at the CQC said:"There is too much awful care that is actually happening and calling time on poor care is something that we have got to do."
Specialist teams will conduct unannounced inspections to ensure care services are safe, caring, effective, responsive to users' needs and well-led. The teams will include members of the public, called ‘Experts by Experience'.
Services will then be rated as either: outstanding; good; requires improvement; and inadequate to provide clear information to the public.
Two handbooks have been issued, one for residential adult social care, to cover both nursing homes and residential homes. The second handbook covers the regulation of community adult social care, including services which care for people at home.
A key aspect of the new CQC regime is the "Mum test", whether or not inspectors would want the care provider to look after a loved-one of their own.
The CQC expect that by March 2016 they will have inspected every adult social care service in England.
Between April and September 2014 the first two waves of inspections were conducted and 952 institutions were inspected. The second wave's inspection reports will begin being published later this month.
Tony Hunter, chief executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) said: "At SCIE, we recognise the importance of the 'Mum Test' in making sure that CQC's inspections are truly focused around the people who receive care. CQC's new model of inspection will go a long way towards ensuring that poor care is stamped out and that quality care is celebrated.
"The handbook will make it more straightforward for providers to recognise what quality care is; and also to determine how to achieve it. At SCIE, we're passionate about supporting the improvement of care experiences and outcomes. To this end we are engaged with the whole range of stakeholders in the development of improvement toolkits and other resources."
