Draft framework. This is CQC's draft for primary care and community services, issued for feedback. It is not the framework your service is inspected and rated against today.
Current position. The existing published framework remains in force while CQC tests and evaluates the proposed approach.
Last reviewed. 23 July 2026.
This page is the primary and community companion to our main explainer, CQC's proposed 2026 assessment framework. Read that first for what is changing across all four sectors. Here we cover only what this draft asks that the others do not.
A note on counting: the primary care draft runs its contents onto a second page, so a quick look suggests 23 headings. Read to the end and it carries all 26, the same as hospitals and mental health.
Where primary and community services are distinctive
Care that continues, not care that ends
Secondary care tends to treat an episode. Primary and community care follows a person over years, and the draft reflects that. Its systems and transitions scope names multi-disciplinary team working and delegation of clinical activities, and its Independence, choice and control scope names end-of-life and palliative care planning and access to friends, family and community.
The evidence question is continuity: can you show the follow-up of a long-term condition across appointments and across the team, not just a good single consultation?
Access, and who cannot reach you
Access is the primary care signature. Under Safe environments and infection prevention and control, the draft names digital systems and technology assurance. Assessing needs names accessibility and communication needs. The practical concern that recurs is digital exclusion: the patient who cannot book, consult or navigate online, and how the service reaches them anyway.
Delegation and the wider team
Under Safe systems, pathways and transitions, the draft names delegation of clinical activities and MDT working. As primary care delivers more through a broader team, the draft expects the delegation, the competence behind it and the oversight to be visible, in the same way adult social care is asked about delegated healthcare.
Consent and resuscitation decisions in the community
Consent scope names capacity to consent and do-not-attempt-cardiopulmonary-resuscitation decisions explicitly. A DNACPR decision made in a community setting, and its communication, is core evidence here.
Sustainability is in scope for this sector
Unlike the adult social care draft, the primary and community draft includes environmental sustainability under Strategic direction, and names evidence-based innovation and quality improvement under Improvement, innovation and learning. It also names a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian under workforce culture. If you run both adult social care and primary care services, do not assume sustainability applies uniformly; it currently differs by draft.
Proportionate to a small, varied estate
Primary care ranges from a single practice to a large community provider. The draft's governance scope stays deliberately broad, which the consultation response read as room for proportionality. That is a reason to size your evidence to the service, not to a hospital.
What to do now
Run the pillar's assurance test against the items above. The two that most often expose a primary care service are continuity, following a long-term condition across the team over time, and access equity, showing what you do for the patient who cannot use the digital route.
Regulation 12 safe care and treatment and Regulation 9 person-centred care are the statutory anchors that do not move with the framework. Our GP and primary care compliance guide covers the sector-wide picture.
Do not rename registers to match draft wording, and do not buy compliance with a framework that is still in testing and may yet be split in two. That includes us.
Related guidance
- Start here: CQC's proposed 2026 assessment framework
- Guide: GP and primary care compliance guide
- Sector overview: GP and primary care
- Regulation explainer: Regulation 9 person-centred care
- Regulation explainer: Regulation 12 safe care and treatment
- Regulation explainer: Regulation 17 good governance
- Library: sample policies
Sources
- CQC, primary care and community services assessment framework draft V6.0, 19 March 2026. Sector-specific scope items above are taken from this document.
- CQC, Better regulation, better care, Summary of Consultation Responses, February 2026.
Sector-distinctive scope is our analysis of the draft, not a formal CQC publication. Where this page says what the draft is likely to mean in practice, that is our reading as an ex-CQC inspector, not CQC guidance.