About Care Quality Commission

Care to join us?

We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve.

Our Role

• We register care providers.

• We monitor, inspect and rate services.

• We take action to protect people who use services.

• We speak with our independent voice, publishing our views on major quality issues in health and social care.

Disability Equality Network At Care Quality Commission – Together we make a difference

The aim of our Disability Equality Network is to raise disability awareness, share the positivity and offer a platform for our colleagues to connect.

Our Network is open to anyone who would like to make a difference; both those living with disabilities or wanting to learn more about disabilities and advocate seeing the positivity in adversity.

In addition to our quarterly meetings we created a number of sub-groups. These include Mental Health, Long-term Conditions, Physical Impairments, Neurodiversity and more. Our members who are experts-by-experience in their field take turns to lead these meetings to offer support and provide a platform to colleagues to share their experiences.

We work with other networks, our People team and our Organisational Development team to influence change and raise awareness and to promote and celebrate events marked in inclusion calendar.

We strongly believe in “Nothing about us, without us” approach to ensure equality and fairness.

Paul Kirby, DEN Member and Former Chair 

"My aim is to empower our members to contribute, influence and champion our network because we are the experts of our own experiences. Those who have known me during my time as a Vice-chair, will know that my passion, integrity and loyalty to the DEN members is to ensure fairness and access for all, at all times and I am never afraid to challenge anyone to ensure it is put right and that the right thing is done. This comes from the energy and the passion I have for the members that I represent as a member of the DEN’s leadership team.

I feel I am ready and competent to lead and support our DEN network and champion the disability movement into the next chapter. I have a lot to contribute to the ongoing success of the network including growing membership numbers, which will allow us to go from strength to strength”.

Individual Reasonable Adjustments in our recruitment process and support from our recruitment team

The recruitment team wants to help make CQC a great place to work, where all our people thrive, feel valued and make a difference.

We want everyone to perform at their very best during the recruitment process. Therefore, we are ensuring that we make clear our support to disabled and neurodivergent colleagues throughout the process.

▪ We’ll be open and transparent around our processes; employing inclusive recruitment practices and endeavouring to offer every candidate the opportunity to perform at their very best throughout the recruitment process.

▪ We’ll support candidates to identify any potential barriers and work with them to identify and facilitate any individual adjustments, as appropriate. See below for examples.

▪ We’ll encourage openness from all candidates and will be supportive, open- minded and treat the information shared and discussed with sensitivity and confidentiality.

We encourage everyone to discuss their barriers and requirements, as early in the recruitment process as possible. This is to ensure we can provide the best possible support to enable everyone to perform at their very best.

Please contact recruitment@cqc.org.uk or call 0191 249 4390 to discuss any barriers and individual adjustments across any part of the recruitment process. The recruitment team are trained to offer a safe, confidential, and non-judgmental environment to share any barriers and concerns. We look forward to supporting you.

Guaranteed Interview Scheme 

This is a scheme that CQC follows whereby if an individual who wishes to be considered under this scheme applies for a role and meets the minimum criteria to benchmark at shortlisting then they will be offered an interview / progress to the next stage of the process.

This does not mean that anyone who applies under this scheme will be automatically shortlisted, they will need to demonstrate within their application how they meet the criteria highlighted in the advert.

Home or Hybrid working

We recognise that not all roles within the organisation may be most effectively undertaken from a shared office environment. There are circumstances when it would be more beneficial, efficient, or flexible, for both CQC and the colleague, for work to be undertaken from home either on a permanent basis, or occasionally in order to complete a particular task. Almost 95% of our workforce are home workers, the remaining are office or hybrid workers.

A colleague may be designated as being a home-based worker either at the point of recruitment to a post that has been assessed as being suitable for home-based working or when a change from office-based working to home-based working is agreed in accordance with the provisions of both the Homeworking policy and CQC’s Flexible Working procedure.