Caroline Ansell – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Caroline Ansell on 2015-11-30.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the effect of the new Care Quality Commission inspection regime on hospital performance; and if he will make a statement.
Ben Gummer
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. The CQC monitors, inspects and regulates services against fundamental standards of quality and safety below which care should never fall.
The CQC’s new inspection regime provides a comprehensive assessment of hospitals performance. During an inspection, the CQC asks five questions of every service and provider; are they safe, effective, caring, well led and responsive to people’s needs. Following an inspection the CQC rates a provider on a four point scale running from outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate. In addition to an aggregate rating at a provider level, the CQC produces ratings for individual services and locations. This gives patients and the public a fair, balanced and easy to understand assessment of performance of a provider.
Where a provider is rated as inadequate the Chief Inspector of Hospitals can recommend that the trust be placed into special measures. This means that trusts receive a tailored package of support to enable them to improve.
As of 8 December there are 15 trusts in special measures. Eleven trusts have made sufficient progress to exit special measures, the most recent being the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust on 4 December.
On 15 October 2015, the CQC published its State of Care Report 2014-15 and reported:
* 83%1 of all providers agree that the new inspections helped them to monitor the quality of care they provide;
* 73%1 of all providers said that a CQC inspection had helped to identify areas of improvement and 72% said that the inspection reports were useful; and
* 68%1 of all providers said that they thought that outcomes for people who use services were improved as result of CQC inspection activity.
1 The information provided in the State of Care report is for all registered providers not just Hospitals.
