Sphere Specialist Healthcare is registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and social care services in England.
Our service was inspected by CQC on 22 May 2024, providing independent scrutiny of the quality and safety of the care and support we provide.
We are proud of our CQC rating, but we believe quality should be demonstrated every day — not simply when an inspection takes place.
Our approach to quality includes regular auditing, monitoring of care outcomes, staff supervision and competency assessment, feedback from clients and families, incident learning, clinical oversight and continuous service improvement.
What Does CQC Look At?
CQC assesses health and social care services against five key questions:
Safe
Are people protected from abuse and avoidable harm?
Effective
Does care and support achieve good outcomes and reflect appropriate evidence, professional standards and people’s individual needs?
Caring
Are people treated with kindness, compassion, dignity and respect?
Responsive
Is care organised around people’s individual needs, preferences and circumstances?
Well-led
Does leadership, management and governance support high-quality, person-centred care, learning and continuous improvement?
These areas help CQC determine the quality of a service and, where applicable, its overall rating.
The Fundamental Standards
As a CQC-registered provider, Sphere must meet the Fundamental Standards — the standards below which care must never fall.
They cover essential areas including person-centred care, dignity and respect, consent, safety, safeguarding, nutrition and hydration, premises and equipment, complaints, governance, staffing, recruitment, duty of candour and the display of ratings.
For Sphere, these are not simply regulatory requirements. They form part of the standards we expect to see reflected in everyday practice.
Quality Statements
CQC’s assessment approach uses Quality Statements to describe what good care should look like in practice.
Written as “We statements”, they describe the commitments expected of providers across the five key questions.
CQC also considers “I statements”, which reflect what people using health and social care services have said matters to them. This helps ensure people’s experiences, choices, outcomes and involvement remain central to how quality is understood.
CQC can gather evidence in different ways and at different times, rather than relying solely on what is observed during a traditional inspection visit.
Our Approach to Quality
At Sphere, regulation is only one part of quality assurance.
We continually review the quality and safety of our services through auditing, care-plan review, incident and safeguarding monitoring, medication governance, staff training and competency, supervision, client and family feedback, regulatory feedback and analysis of care outcomes.
Where something could be better, we want to identify it, learn from it and improve.
Our aim is not simply to demonstrate compliance. It is to provide safe, effective and genuinely person-centred care that supports people to live well, maintain independence and achieve the outcomes that matter to them.
View Sphere Specialist Healthcare’s latest inspection report and rating on the CQC website.
