CQC is retiring the one-size-fits-all Single Assessment Framework. Here's what's replacing it.

For several years, CQC assessed every kind of regulated service, a hospital trust, a GP practice, an 18-bed care home, a dental surgery, against the same generic model: the Single Assessment Framework, usually shortened to SAF. It was meant to bring consistency. In practice, the widespread criticism was that a single template stretched thin across such different settings ends up describing none of them particularly well.

The proposal: back to sector-specific frameworks

In response, CQC proposed moving away from the one-size-fits-all model and reintroducing frameworks built for each sector. Four drafts went out for consultation: Adult Social Care, Mental Health Care, Primary Care & Community Services, and Hospitals (Secondary & Specialist Care). The consultation closed on 12 June 2026.

This isn’t a return to something entirely unfamiliar. It’s closer to how CQC assessed services before SAF, with the difference that the core structure, the five key questions, carries forward rather than being rebuilt from nothing.

What isn’t changing

Two things are staying fixed across all four sector frameworks. The five key questions, Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led, remain the backbone of assessment. And the four ratings, Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate, remain how services are judged against them. Whatever the sector-specific detail ends up looking like, it slots underneath this same structure.

What actually changes

What changes is the content sitting underneath each key question, the quality statements, the specific evidence expected, the regulations they map to, built around what genuinely matters in each sector rather than a template that has to cover everything at once. A quality statement about medicines management, for instance, looks structurally similar across sectors but points to very different evidence: MAR charts and a controlled-drugs register in a care home, prescribing SOPs and MHRA alert handling in a GP practice, emergency drug stock and AED checks in a dental practice.

What providers should do now

Nothing about this consultation is a reason to wait. The evidence that holds up under any version of a sector framework is the same evidence that held up under SAF: current, dated, specific to the requirement it’s proving, and something staff actually know and follow rather than a document that exists in name only. Building that now means the sector-specific rollout is a refinement to an already solid position, not a scramble to catch up.