The Care Quality Commission (CQC) today confirms how it will regulate, inspect and rate hospitals, community health services and mental health services in England.
Following a consultation earlier this year, it has published a range of documents that will help providers of care services to understand how they will be assessed and rated from 1 October 2014.
The new style of inspection has been developed and tested since the first inspections under the new approach in September 2013 using larger and more specialist teams of inspectors, expert and experts by experience – members of the public with experience of hospital care.
The documents for the acute, mental health and community health sectors, are published alongside our response to the consultation, the hospitals regulatory impact assessment (which reviews our new model) and equality assessment and our human rights approach.
Professor Sir Mike Richards, CQC's Chief Inspector of Hospitals said:
"The publishing of the provider handbooks marks an important milestone for CQC.
"During the past year we have been testing our new style inspections in hospitals, mental health and community health services. We would like to thank everyone who took part in our consultation.
"We have listened to feedback and refined our approach to ensure that we’re consistent and our judgements are fair regardless of whether we're inspecting a large teaching hospital or a small community provider.
"The handbooks outline how we will be carrying out our inspections and rating providers based on whether services are outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.
"We continue to learn and update our methods so that we continue to make sure that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high quality care that encourage services to improve."
CQC is publishing a suite of documents:
- NHS acute provider handbook and appendices
- Community health services handbook and appendices
- Specialist mental health services handbook and appendices
- Hospitals handbook consultation response document
- Hospitals regulatory impact assessment
- Hospitals equality impact assessment
- Human rights approach document
- NHS acute hospitals, specialist mental health and community health services
- Human rights approach
During the consultation we asked a number of questions. These were broadly broken down into seeking views on: how we will seek out and listen to the experiences of the public, including patients and their relatives, friends or carers; whether the core services were the right ones to inspect; whether our KLOES (key lines of inquiry) are robust; and how we would we make sure that our ratings are consistent.
In response, we:
- will use multiple sources of evidence, where they exist, to support our findings and make a judgement about the quality and safety of care provided
- have reflected on how we define some of the core services so that they more accurately reflect the scope of the service
- have revised our KLOEs to ensure we had the right level of focus on particular issues, and rephrased the prompts as questions for our inspection teams to consider
have reviewed the principles that we use to aggregate individual ratings up into overall ratings.