Regulation 9: Person-centred care

“The care and treatment of service users must be appropriate, meet their needs and reflect their preferences.” (Regulation 9(1))

The headline duty in Reg 9(1) is short. The operational weight sits in Reg 9(3), which lists what the registered person must also do: assess the person’s needs and preferences with them, design care to meet those needs and reflect those preferences, help the person understand the choices and the risks and benefits of treatment, support them to make their own decisions to the maximum extent possible, give them opportunities to manage their own care, involve those close to them where appropriate, provide the information they need, make reasonable adjustments, and have regard to wellbeing in meeting nutritional and hydration needs.

Where a person aged 16 or over lacks capacity, the duties under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 apply (Reg 9(5)); where Part 4 or 4A of the Mental Health Act 1983 applies, care must follow that Act (Reg 9(6)).

Reg 9 is one of the easiest standards to agree with and one of the easiest to under-evidence. CQC does not inspect the policy that says care is person-centred; it samples the records and tests whether the person is actually in them. An inspector pulls a handful of care plans and asks: was this person assessed, are their preferences recorded and not just their needs, were they involved in the plan and its reviews, and can the team show the care delivered matched it.

The evidence that carries weight is the individual detail: a care plan that reads like one person rather than a template, a recorded choice the service acted on, a reasonable adjustment made, the person or someone close to them named in a review. The standard is not a perfect plan; it is a plan that is visibly the person’s own.

The common gap is a care plan that captures needs in full but preferences barely at all, so the record could belong to anyone with the same condition. The next is the review that happens on schedule but without the person in it, recorded as “no change” with no sign they were asked. Then there is the reasonable adjustment that was made in practice but never written down, so at inspection it cannot be evidenced. Each of these reads as a person-centred-care finding even when the day-to-day care is kind, because Reg 9 is tested on the record, not the intention.

Verivius keeps the person-centred evidence in the ordinary care record rather than rebuilt for inspection: assessment and care planning that prompt for preferences alongside needs, reviews that record who was involved, and the trail that shows the care delivered matched the plan.

Sample policy template: Person-centred care. Further reading: Regulation 9 person-centred care, what CQC-ready evidence looks like.