March 25th 2026

By Ailsa Colquhoun

CQC opens consultation on draft primary care assessment framework

CQC has opened feedback for the new draft assessment framework for primary care.

Stakeholders are asked to assess the draft content on four outcome measures:

• guide CQC in carrying out assessments and making clearer, more transparent and consistent judgements about quality
• help providers to understand what CQC will be looking for and improve the quality of care they deliver
• help CQC and providers to identify and address the issue of inequalities in care
• reflect the range of services and sectors that we regulate across health and adult social care.

The draft primary care and community services sector assessment framework  is one of four covering regulated sectors such mental health care, hospitals (secondary and specialist care) and social care.

These plan to retain the CQC’s five key questions covering domains such as safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led. They will be supported by:  

• key lines of enquiry framed as structured questions that describe what we will look for on our assessments – these replace the current quality statements
• rating characteristics that describe what outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate care looks like in each sector
• I statements drawn from the Making It Real framework co-produced by Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) together with a wide range of partners and people with lived experience of health and care services. These ensure that people’s lived experience remains central to our assessments and set out what good care feels like from the perspective of those using services.

In the area of safe delivery of treatments and medicines, the CQC will ask: Are medicines and treatments delivered safely and in a timely way, in line with people’s needs and preferences?

Scope of this key line of enquiry and topic areas include:

• Prescribing
• IV medicines/fluids/medical gasses
• Storage and disposal of medicines
• Controlled drugs
• Self-medication
• Antimicrobial stewardship
• STOMP/STAMP (medication in children and young people)
• Innovative medicines.

As an example outstanding care in this area will feature the following:

• People and those close to them are active partners in decisions, assessments and reviews about their medicines or treatment, where possible. The service implements creative, person-centred solutions to enable this.
• There is a comprehensive system to proactively promote the safe optimisation of medicines.
• Staff at all levels are clear about roles and responsibilities in relation to medicines.
• Staff contribute to innovative research on medicines and treatments.

Give your views online by 5pm on June 12