In Part 2 of the series, we looked at the Care Quality Commission (CQC), a national body part of the NHS.
Just to remind you: CQC is England's independent regulator of health and adult social care. It ensures that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and encourages service improvement. It monitors, inspects, and regulates services and publishes what it finds. Where they see poor care, they use certain powers to take action.
Our TTE Recommendations were:
“In October 2022, we recommended appointing an advocate for each patient, especially the frail, disadvantaged, or disabled. Christine’s law; lest we forget. Taking consumer apps as an example, could the CQC be substituted for a far cheaper, bottom-up reporting system from citizens or their advocates?
The annual report and accounts for the Food Standards Agency report a net cost of £130.5 million in 21/22. The CQC needs to do more for less, using a bottom-up approach that relies on patient-facing/advocate responses to direct care, clinician input, and a system responsive to whistleblowers when care goes wrong.
We said there would be a potential saving of £150 million by defunding it.
This is not to say we told you so, but yesterday's CQC internal review concluded that CQC is a failure and needs “ a major organisational restructure.”
The report also recommends a single assessment framework for all the sectors that CQC regulates and the development of a new IT system called the regulatory platform.
We are not sure we’ve ever read such a damning report :
The ‘CQC has been unable to fulfil its primary purpose,’ ‘staff are demoralised’, ‘clinical leadership and oversight of the inspection programmes has been lost’, and ‘a fundamental reset of the organisation is needed.’
We recommend reading the post, as it’s a horror show: the CQC: assessors wrote reports on services they haven’t inspected; hospital and primary care inspectors were supervised by a line manager who is not familiar with their specialism, and quality assurance of reports is done by personnel with no knowledge and experience of the relevant area.
Add to this that ‘the CQC’s’c credibility with providers has been lost,’ then it seems more appropriate to abolish it and save an estimated (by us) £150 million.
The DHSC review by Dr Penny Dash (chair of a London ICS) mentioned in the CQC Richards report is expected to be published imminently. According to Pulse magazine, its findings are similar to those of Sir Mike’s: CQC has lost its credibility.
Internal CQC review recommends evaluation of one-word ratings
This post was written by two old geezers who got paid nought for reaching the same conclusions.
"assessors wrote reports on services they haven’t inspected;
hospital and primary care inspectors were supervised by a line manager who is not familiar with their specialism, and
quality assurance of reports is done by personnel with no knowledge and experience of the relevant area."
is anyone surprised? How could you get anyone with clinical expertise to spend valuable time overseeing someone else; and more importantly; express concerns
as Carl says, it has to be someone "with skin in the game": a patient or their relatives .......
CQC hopes to 'make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care, and encourage care services to improve'
As far as I know, this organization does not audit any outcome measures or compare such measures against national standards or comparative organizations.
The focus is on the nursing care. Is it tailored to your needs? Can you be visited or accompanied? Are you asked to consent to interventions? Are you put at risk that could be avoided? Are you subject to abuse? Do you have enough to eat? Are the premises clean?
Patients could receive good care by these measures but receive inadequate treatment and have poor outcomes.