Quality Statements: Quality statements are the commitments CQC expects providers to meet, written from the perspective of the person using the service, and grouped under the five key questions of safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.
They replaced the older Key Lines of Enquiry as the structure CQC assesses against, and they are phrased as “we” statements describing what good care looks like in practice.
The practical consequence is that evidence has to be about experience and outcomes, not just process. A policy proves you have a rule. A quality statement asks whether people actually experience the thing that rule was meant to deliver, which is why observation, conversations and records are weighted together.
Providers usually find it helps to map each policy and audit to the quality statements it supports, so gaps are visible before an assessment rather than during one.