CQC publishes annual report and accounts for 2017/18

Our annual report and accounts, published today, reflects on our achievements in 2017/18 and our improved performance. We are proud of the progress we have made in strengthening the way we regulate health and care services, but we acknowledge that there is more to do and we are committed to continually improving.

In 2017/18 we have for the first time been able to build on our baseline understanding of the quality of health and social care. We have started monitoring, inspecting and rating using our new intelligence-driven approach, targeting inspections where we see that the quality of care has changed.

We carried out a number of local system reviews to look at the challenges health and care organisations face when working together, highlighting some good practice and opportunities for better collaboration in our national report, Beyond barriers. Our annual State of Care report and thematic reports, such as our report on children and young people’s mental health, have also highlighted and supported improvement in health and care.

Our financial performance continues to be good. We have reduced costs and spent within our budget. We are on track to meet the target set by the government’s spending review.

As we reach the mid-point of our current strategy, we are taking stock and looking ahead to where need to build on our progress in 2018/19 to make sure we are on track to meet our strategic priorities. Work will continue to deliver our large programme of digital development to transform our systems and processes. We will continue to find efficiencies and improve the speed at which we publish inspection reports. For our staff, we will focus on addressing staff workload pressures and improving how we manage change and communications.

Sir David Behan, Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission, said:

“2017/18 has been a good year for CQC as we have strengthened how we monitor, inspect and rate services. We have built on our robust baseline of quality across health and social care and started our next phase of targeted and tailored regulation. While we have seen solid and consistent performance across our work and we have improved in most areas when compared with 2016/17, we recognise that we have more to do in areas such as the timeliness of inspection reports. We are proud of what we have achieved as an organisation and we are working hard to grow, learn and improve.

“I want to thank all of our staff for their dedication and commitment to ensuring health and social care services provide the safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care that everyone deserves. At all times, we remain committed to acting independently and being on the side of people who use services, their families and their carers.

“As we look ahead I am confident that our intelligence-driven approach will better protect people from poor care by helping us to quickly and clearly identify where quality may have changed. Health and social care services must adapt to the challenges they face and we in turn must respond by being ready to evolve and change the way we regulate to continue to drive improvements in care.”

Highlights from 2017/18 include:

• Completing more than 17,000 inspections and seeing an overall improvement of ratings, with more services rated as good and outstanding compared with 2016/17.
• Starting our next phase of more targeted and tailored regulation underpinned by our substantial investment in digital technology to transform the way we collect, process and share information.
• Carrying out a number of local system reviews of how local health and care systems work together
• Issuing 2,283 enforcement actions to hold providers to account where we find they are putting people at risk of poor care, including five criminal prosecutions in 2017/18.
• Recommending that 720 providers or locations enter special measures because of serious failings in care. Of the 704 providers that exited special measures, 479 did so because they had made enough improvement.
• Publishing our principles for regulating new models of care and our report on the quality of online primary care providers
• Encouraging providers to improve through our Driving improvement case study report series that highlights acute trusts, adult social care services, mental health trusts and GP practices
• Rolling out new mobile technology to support staff on inspection
• Setting out our equality objectives for 2017 to 2019 and publishing our results that demonstrate we have no gender pay gap.

The accounts have received a clean audit opinion from the Comptroller and Auditor General. This means that our accounts are fair and accurate. We lay our annual report and accounts before Parliament every year.