CQC’s first round of acute hospital inspections completed on schedule

CQC has completed its comprehensive inspection programme of all 154 acute NHS trusts in England this month as planned.

Already we have seen clear improvements in the quality and safety of care with 11 NHS trusts previously subject to special measures coming out of the regime as a result of the progress we have identified when we have inspected them again.

The inspections we’ve carried out so far are delivering a deeper insight into the quality and safety of services than ever before and are helping to drive improvements so that patients get better care.

Now that we have inspected all acute NHS trusts we have a baseline for quality which we will use to feed into our future approach to regulation of the sector. The remaining inspection reports and ratings will be published within the next few months and we will be pulling together an analysis of our findings to date later in the summer.

For information about what our inspections have allowed us to find out and enable within the NHS, please read our latest State of Care report.