CQC evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee shows the scale of operational failings
The CQC Chair and Chief Executive, Ian Dilks and Sir Julian Hartley, appeared before the Health and Social Care Committee yesterday, 15 January 2025. Their evidence revealed the extent of the operational failings following the disastrous transformation plan and the scale of the improvement needed to restore confidence in the regulator, which Sir Julian Hartley said would be addressed initially through four priorities:
- Complete more assessments
- Deal with backlogs in notifications
- Get the 500 “stuck” assessments out of the regulatory platform
- Reduce the time to register services
Average age of assessments is “around four years”
Sir Julian Hartley said that the average age of assessments is “around four years” and that they were not moving fast enough to re-inspect services that are inadequate or require improvement, and accepted when asked whether the CQC was doing its job to ensure the safety of regulated services that “we are not delivering for people”. Sir Julian Hartley told the Committee that he did not think it was possible to have a Single Assessment Framework (SAF) for all of the services regulated by the CQC and said that he hoped to appoint four Chief Inspectors in the coming months to lead on hospitals, primary care, adult social care and mental health and return specialist knowledge to the organisation that was replaced with a generalist approach under the SAF, discussed in our earlier article.
Backlog of 5,000 notifications
Additional resource, including NHS staff to provide much needed clinical input, has been put in place to address the backlog of notifications which the Committee heard was around 5,000 with the oldest unactioned notification received by the CQC on 19 August 2024, and the oldest notification triaged but awaiting first risk review received on 20 November 2023. Mr Dilks told the Committee that there was an effective triage system in place and notifications relating to safeguarding concerns were dealt with more quickly, though the extent of the backlog meant that this was not within the 10 day target.
500 assessments “stuck” in the regulatory platform
Sir Julian Hartley gave frank evidence to the Committee that the regulatory platform is not fit for purpose and is preventing staff from doing their job. Illustrating the “unbelievable” difficulties for staff since the regulatory platform went live, Mr Dilks gave an example that staff can work on a report, submit it to the relevant stage on the system “and then it gets stuck”. Sir Julian Hartley said he was working to get “500 stuck assessments out” as a priority and had commissioned an IT expert, the outcome of the expert’s review is not yet known. In the meantime, a work around, that is not reliant on the regulatory platform, has been put in place to enable inspectors to complete more assessments.
Work around to speed up registrations
The Committee was told that 29% of registration applications were not processed within the 10 week target. Sir Julian Hartly said that he had increased the number of staff involved in processing registration applications and has moved registration applications off the regulatory platform as it is “simply not working”, with online forms now in place to process registration applications.
We will be following further updates on the CQC’s progress and our team is on hand to assist with your regulatory queries.
