The flow of news updates from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) continues. The CQC was widely criticised following recent failures in the regulation and inspection of social care provision. The Winterbourne View inquiry highlighted,for example, the CQC’s failure to address the concerns of staff who attempted to whistle-blow. In the face of such criticism, the CQC has promised reform and improvement. At the same time it has had additional duties and responsibilities placed upon it!
In recent weeks, the CQC has issued the following news:
We’ve appointed our Heads of Registration We have appointed two new permanent Heads of Registration who will support the Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Corporate Lead for Registration, Andrea Sutcliffe, in delivering all of our registration activities across health and adult social care services in England.
Our response to Orchid View Serious Case Review Following a Serious Case Review in relation to Orchid View that was made public by West Sussex Adults Safeguarding Board this week, we have published our own report. This is to provide a full picture of our involvement at Orchid View between September 2009 and October 2011, including lessons that have been learned and action that has been taken.
We’ve appointed all of our Heads of Adult Social Care Inspections Eleven new Heads of Adult Social Care Inspections have now been appointed to support the Adult Social Care directorate in transforming the way adult social care services are regulated and inspected. The new appointments complete a final team of 13 Heads of Inspections who collectively will lead the regionally based specialist adult social care teams across England. They will make sure that the programme of inspections for the 25,000 adult social care locations are effectively delivered.
Increase in registered managers since we announced plans to take tough action We’ve secured a 57% increase in the number of new registered managers across 2439 health and social care services that we targeted in a six-month project. We set up the project last September to improve the high number of locations operating without a registered manager in place for the longest periods of time. It ran from November 2013 to April 2014. This is in addition to reviews carried out by our inspectors at locations across the whole of England. Based on project figures set out in yesterday’s Board report, 1395 out of those locations now have a registered manager in place. A further 470 (20%) manager applications have been submitted to us for approval. We’ve also used enforcement powers across 590 locations that failed to appoint or submit an application for a registered manager. A high proportion responded without the need for us to take further action but 42% have paid a Fixed Penalty Notice. We’ll continue to work with providers to ensure all health and adult social care services that are required to have registered managers fill these positions.
The CQC is apparently an organisation undergoing cultural change. It clearly wishes to be more open approachable (It now invites concerned parties to ‘share their experience‘ with them). We will continue to monitor developments at the CQC.