Care Inspectorate Newsletter Provider update for adult and older people's services from the Care Inspectorate Tue 28/04/2026

The Care Inspectorate is continually developing how we inspect regulated services to ensure that our approaches are intelligence-led, responsive and proportionate. 

Core assurance inspections 

The core assurances are designed to guide providers in the areas most critical to people’s safety and wellbeing. These are the key areas that inspectors consistently assess during every inspection, as both experience and research show they are essential to ensuring a service is safe.  

Following successful pilot inspections carried out in 2023 and 2024 for adult services, we are introducing core assurance inspections as a new inspection type for adult services. The test inspections showed us that this inspection type can provide robust assurance that the service continues to provide care and support that is safe, effective and responsive to people’s needs, rights and wishes. It is also able to alert us to actual or potential areas for concern and risks that we can then respond to (by adapting the inspection type where necessary). This approach focuses on the core assurances outlined within the quality frameworks and is intended to reflect a proportionate approach to assurance and improvement in better performing services. 

Criteria 

The agreed eligibility criteria for using this inspection type is as follows. 

• All adult services with evaluations of good (4) and above across all areas under the quality framework.   

• Low or Medium Scrutiny Assessment Tool (SAT).  

• Previous inspection was evaluated (graded). 

• No significant concerns about standards of care at the service.  

Where services have a core assurance inspection, this will always be part of a cycle of evaluated inspections. The next inspection following a core assurance inspection will always be evaluated.  

How do core assurance inspections work? 

During a core assurance inspection, the inspector will focus only on the core assurances relevant to the specific service type. Inspectors will still observe practice, sample documents, and speak to people to understand their experience of the service. People’s experiences and feedback on the service will confirm if care and support is responsive to their needs and promotes their safety, wellbeing and rights.  

Core assurance inspections are not evaluated (graded) and do not provide a validation of previous evaluations as the inspector will not be inspecting individual quality indicators or key questions. Inspection reports for core assurance inspections have a shorter format, summarising the key findings and highlighting strengths and progress at the service.   

If, during the inspection, the inspector identifies concerns in relation to a specific core assurance, they may need to assess a particular area in more detail. This means they may need to change the inspection type in order to fully evaluate one or more quality indicators.  In such cases, this then becomes either a hybrid inspection, or even a full inspection (where there are multiple concerns) and inspectors will evaluate (grade) that quality indicator to reflect the current situation.  

The error response and action plan (where relevant) process remain unchanged, and reports will continue to be published on the service’s page on the Care Inspectorate website within established timeframes.