Ratings for care home and domiciliary support services
Published ratings for these service types are due to be introduced from April 2025.
In readiness for this, we undertook a pilot of silent or unpublished ratings for those care home and domiciliary support services which were inspected during the latter half of 2023.
A total of four inspection ratings, which reflect the categories of leadership and management; environment; care and support; and wellbeing were given to providers verbally, but were not published in their inspection report.
In order for us to get an understanding of what worked well and what areas needed further development following this testing phase, we asked an independent company, Practice Solutions Ltd (External link), to evaluate our approach.
We have now published their findings – you can read the report by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page.
What’s next?
We remain committed to working with the sector to ensure people receive the best possible care and support and the evaluation report provides a welcome opportunity for further engagement to address the issues which have emerged to date.
We are considering the recommendations carefully and will be publishing an action plan responding to the recommendations later this summer. The action plan will include further details on the steps we will take in preparation for ratings being published from April 2025. Next month the Welsh Government will be launching a full public consultation on draft regulations which will provide the legal basis for published inspection ratings.
While we continue to prepare for the implementation of published ratings, our inspectors will still be awarding silent ratings to care home and domiciliary support services when they are inspected. This is to help prepare providers for the implementation of published ratings and to give our inspectors the greatest opportunity to become familiar with ratings as part of their inspection methodology.