Response to the Cavendish Review of training and support of healthcare assistants

Introduction

We welcome this review. We agree that this group is a vitally important part of the healthcare workforce and often provide fundamental components of care. In our view, to allow this group to ‘be as good as they can possibly be’ we need to focus time and resources on improving recruitment, training supervision and support and not be distracted by calls for additional regulation.

Right-touch regulation

As part of our work we have developed thinking on regulatory policy, which we describe as ‘right-touch regulation’: the minimum regulatory effort to achieve the desired result. Our commitment to this approach and our assessment of the current evidence has led us to conclude that statutory regulation is not appropriate for healthcare assistants.