National Health Service organisations and publicly funded social care providers must comply with the Accessible Information Standard (AIS) to meet the communication needs of patients and carers with a disability, impairment, or sensory loss. NHS England has completed a review of the AIS to help ensure that everyone’s communication needs are met in health and care provision. The review considered the effectiveness of the current AIS, how the standard is implemented and enforced in practice, and identified recommendations for improvement. The revised standard will be published in due course.

Following publication of the revised standard, NHS England will continue work to support implementation with awareness raising, communication and engagement and updated e-learning modules on the AIS to ensure NHS staff are better aware of the standard and their roles and responsibilities in implementing it.

These actions should support better and more consistent implementation of the standard.

In addition to the AIS, following Royal Assent of the British Sign Language Act 2022, the Government Communication Service will promote and facilitate the use of British Sign Language (BSL) in communications with the public. This is expected to support BSL users to access public services, including health and care services. Our work to promote BSL builds on a longstanding departmental commitment to ensuring our content is accessible for disabled audiences. Our GOV.UK and social media content closely follows guidance from the Government Digital Service. All videos are captioned for those who are hard of hearing, graphics have accessible texts and colours for those with reading difficulties and have voiceover descriptions for the partially sighted.

The Care Quality Commission encourages staff and service users and their families to inform the regulator of experiences of care and any concerns using the Give Feedback on Care service, which is available at the following link:

https://www.cqc.org.uk/give-feedback-on-care

Those who use services can participate in inspections through the Experts by Experience programme. During inspections, Experts by Experience consult service users and their families, which is used to support the inspectors’ judgements.

Under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 all providers of regulated activities, including National Health Service and independent providers, must register with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and follow a set of fundamental standards of safety and quality. The CQC uses its enforcement powers to address failings in poor care and to remove organisations that are not meeting the fundamental standards of care from the provider marketplace. The enforcement action can range from issuing cautions, fines to prosecuting cases where people are harmed as a result of neglect or placed in danger of harm.

In any setting, local authorities have a statutory duty to safeguard adults with care and support needs and should take swift action to investigate where anyone alleges poor care, abuse or neglect. The Health and Care Bill will introduce a new duty for the CQC to assess local authorities’ delivery of their adult social care duties, including safeguarding. The Department is working closely with the CQC and other key stakeholders to design a system to ensure the best possible outcomes for care users.