Health and social care support for people with dementia

What we have heard and learned

We are grateful to the contributions that people with lived experience, carers, professionals, providers and other national stakeholders have made to this work so far. 

Several themes emerged from this engagement, as well as from the insights we have gathered from our regulatory work. We have also heard the call from other organisations like the Nuffield Trust, Alzheimer's Society and Skills for Care for national stakeholders to raise the national profile of dementia and work together on defining and implementing good practice in these areas.

These themes and insights from our engagement include:

Access to health and care support before and after a dementia diagnosis

A clear, accessible, easy-to-navigate pathway of care is needed. This should be joined up between social care, community care and other health services to enable seamless transitions between services, focusing on prevention and risk reduction.

Person-centred care and principles that respect and protect people's rights 

This should be central to areas such as: 

• planning and delivery of care
• consent and communication
• coordination of care between services
• equity of access to evidence-based treatments
• environmental adaptations
• safety alongside positive risk taking. 

Health and social care workforce capability and competency

Consistent workforce skills, knowledge and values that reflect an understanding of dementia and delivering person-centred support is important.

Support for carers

Carers must be respected, supported, involved and listened to, and acknowledged for their expertise in the person they care for.

Inequalities and unwarranted variation

People and carers have very different experiences across health and social care depending on where they live, how their care is funded or their protected characteristics.  

What we will do

The central vision statement of CQC’s Dementia Strategy is:

As a dementia-friendly and inclusive organisation, CQC uses its powers and purpose to tackle inequalities and promote and protect rights to improve the care, support and experience of people living with dementia and their carers.

To achieve this vision, our Dementia Strategy has 6 core objectives: 

• We will co-produce evidence-based statutory guidance for what good dementia care looks like and link to good practice guidance under our assessment framework.
• We will apply the statutory guidance across our regulatory activity.
• We will use our independent voice to tackle inequalities and encourage improvement and innovation.
• We will be a dementia-friendly and inclusive organisation to benefit our staff and the wider public.
• Our staff will receive comprehensive dementia training and work with partners to influence training and competency for the health and social care workforce.
• We will actively work in partnership with key stakeholders to collectively affect real change.

What's next

Our next steps for progressing this work will be focused on the following areas:

Developing statutory guidance and defining good practice

We will work towards achieving objective 1 to develop statutory guidance. We will:

• involve people with lived experience, carers and a wide range of other stakeholders in co-production, ensuring the guidance is led by the voice and experiences of people who use services
• carry out research into the characteristics of effective dementia care, including learning from other countries and regulators, as well as further information gathering to develop a robust evidence base on which to build the statutory guidance principles.

Learning and development needs of CQC’s workforce

To ensure we are effective in our regulation of services for people with dementia, we will ensure that we understand and respond to the learning needs of our own staff in this area. This includes carrying out a learning needs analysis, defining learning objectives and developing training and guidance for CQC staff aligned to the statutory guidance we publish. 

Engagement and communication

We will apply a wide range of tools and approaches to involve people, carers, key stakeholders and CQC staff in the development of this work. We will continue to work collaboratively with other key stakeholders and policymakers on joint improvement ambitions and actions that enable good dementia care, in areas like workforce, system pathways and technology. We will share updates on our work with the public, providers and other partners and share future opportunities to get involved.