CQC Readiness Self-Check
Free, in-browser, nothing storedPublished 10 June 2026
What this is
A free self-check for UK domiciliary agencies: 19 questions across CQC’s five key questions (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led), each answered Yes, Partly or No. What it produces is not a quiz score: you get a structured readiness picture across the five key questions, a per-question breakdown, and a prioritised list of gaps built from your own answers, each linking to a free resource that helps close it. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and there is no email gate. It is a self-reflection tool, not a CQC assessment, rating or prediction.
A guide, not advice. This tool gives a structured self-reflection only; it is not regulatory advice and not a prediction of any CQC outcome. CQC assesses against the Single Assessment Framework using its own evidence, and the framework itself is being reformed during 2026. Verify anything consequential against CQC’s current published guidance and your own advisers.
Safe
Every carer has pre-employment checks (DBS, references, right to work) completed and on file before their first visit.
Medication support is recorded on complete, contemporaneous MAR charts, and any gap is investigated as a possible medication error.
Staff can recognise and report a safeguarding concern, and your process records what happened next, not just that it was raised.
Each client has current risk assessments written as enabling-with-safeguards rather than blanket restrictions.
Effective
Carers are trained and competency-assessed for the tasks they actually perform (moving and handling, medication support) before doing them unsupervised.
Care plans are reviewed on a set cadence and after trigger events: a fall, a hospital stay, a change in how the person is coping.
Consent to care is recorded, and where capacity is in doubt, assessments and best-interests decisions are documented.
A carer arriving for a first visit could learn what matters about the person from the records alone.
Caring
Care plans capture the person in their own words, not paraphrased into clinical language.
Plans record what people can and want to do for themselves, so support enables rather than takes over.
You regularly hear from clients and families about how the care feels, and can show what changed because of what they said.
Responsive
Each plan says plainly how much latitude the person wants carers to use, so a new carer knows where judgement is welcome.
Plans record the outcomes that matter to the person, not only the task list.
Complaints are logged, responded to within your stated timescale, and you can evidence what you learned from them.
When needs change the plan changes with them, and the daily notes corroborate the plan rather than contradicting it.
Well-led
Your team knows the Single Assessment Framework: quality statements, evidence categories and continuous assessment, not the retired KLOEs.
Audits (MAR charts, care plans, daily notes) run on a schedule and produce actions that get closed, not just findings that get filed.
Incidents, accidents and near misses are reviewed for patterns, with clear oversight of what changed as a result.
Staff feedback is gathered and acted on, and carers can describe the care in the same terms the records use.
Your self-assessment
0 of 19 answered
Answer all 19 questions for your readiness picture and a prioritised list of gaps.
A self-reflection tool, not a CQC assessment. This check produces your own answers organised usefully; it is not a CQC assessment, rating or prediction. CQC assesses against the Single Assessment Framework using its own evidence, gathered continuously. Verify anything consequential against CQC’s current published guidance.
The five key questions
- Safe
- Not started
- Effective
- Not started
- Caring
- Not started
- Responsive
- Not started
- Well-led
- Not started
Why a self-check, and why these questions
Under the Single Assessment Framework, CQC gathers evidence continuously and triangulates it: records are checked against what people, families and staff actually say, and against what inspectors observe. That design has a practical consequence for providers: the useful question is no longer “are we ready for the inspection?” but “would our records, our staff and our clients tell the same story this week?” The 19 questions here are built for that test. They draw on the framework’s own logic (quality statements, evidence categories, the person-centred duty under Regulation 9) and on uncontroversial fundamentals: recruitment checks, medication records, safeguarding process, care plan currency, complaint handling.
The honest limits matter as much as the questions. Your answers are self-ratings, so the result is a readiness band and a prioritised gap list, never a score dressed up as a rating prediction. Where a gap matches a resource we have actually built, the list links to it: care plan gaps point to the CQC care plan guide and free template, medication gaps to the MAR chart explainer. Where no resource of ours genuinely helps, the item stands on its own rather than linking somewhere for the sake of it.
Close the gaps where the evidence lives
Most of the gaps this check surfaces are record-keeping gaps: plans that drift from practice, notes that do not corroborate, audits that find but do not close. VircareOS keeps the care plan, the daily notes and the eMAR in one place, so the record that CQC triangulates stays matched to the care as it happens. The price is published, sign-up takes about 60 seconds, and the first three months are free with no card.
About a minute to set up. No card required.