CQC has completed the inspection of all adult social care and GP services registered prior to 1 October 2014.
This is quite a feat and involved inspecting over 30,000 adult social care services and over 8,000 GP practices. CQC often missed their own self-imposed deadline for completion of this work owing to staffing issues and its inability to turnaround a number of inspection reports according to its unofficial deadline of 50 working days of the inspection.
CQC will now seek to build upon this baseline record of inspecting care services and amend its approach so that it can better target its inspection activity. It will state that it now has a comprehensive shared view of quality across care services in the UK. This view of quality will only be one that is shared within CQC’s own department. Each service is different with its own unique pressures and services should be mindful to challenge the findings of inspectors who can fail, at times, to take proper consideration of the context of failings identified during the short period that inspectors visit services and write their reports.
CQC’s achievement should not be underestimated and the job they complete is one which is necessary; this achievement is tempered by the quality of the inspection team that visits the Service and the performance of the Service at the time of the visit.
We await the publishing of the consultation which focuses exclusively on the details of changes to the way that CQC addresses adult social care and GP practices in Spring this year.
