3The quality of care nationwide
Our report focuses on how well services are performing. It covers social care services, NHS and independent health care services as well as primary care trusts and councils.
When assessing the quality of England’s health care and social care services, we don’t just look at the care provided by individual care services. We also look at how well primary care trusts and councils select which services to buy (commission) care from, as their decisions have a big impact on the quality of care available to local people.
Equally important to us as evidence of a service’s quality are the views of the people who use it, and those of their families and carers.
The overall picture
- Great improvements have been made in health care and social care in England in recent years.
- In 2009 this overall improvement continued, and some services and areas of the country performed exceptionally well.
- A small minority of services were failing to meet basic standards of quality and safety.
- We want to see far less variation in quality, so that everyone using services has a positive experience of care. This particularly applies to the areas of safety, safeguarding of people using services, and training and development of staff.
Find out more about the quality of care nationwide
