CQC Special Update

An update for local public stakeholders interested in health and social care       

CQC tells local services to work more closely and use VCSE organisations

Our end of programme report ‘Beyond Barriers’ brings together all the learning from 20 geographical local system reviews of how older people move through the health and social care system. We found that services need to look at working much closer together in order to improve people’s experiences. Voluntary, community, and social enterprise (VCSE) sector organisations are under-used in the planning and delivery of services.

Commissioning is critical in this planning, and yet we saw that commissioning was often focused on individual services rather than the whole system.

Can you learn from the case studies included within the report? Is a similar organisation to your own doing something you could replicate?

Use the report to have a conversation with partners, especially commissioners, that you work with in your own local system, how can they involve you better in planning services? 

Download our toolkit here to get started.

We’re updating our approach to regulating independent healthcare services!

Earlier this year we ran a consultation to find out what people thought of our proposals to update how we regulate independent healthcare services. We proposed to make our inspections of these services more targeted and use intelligence being given to us to help us decide where to inspect. This will bring our regulation for independent healthcare in line with NHS hospitals, adult social care services and primary care, which already take this approach.

We’ve now published the response to our consultation and we’ve updated the guidance we give to providers setting out the changes we will be making in how they are regulated.

We received 263 responses to the consultation from a range of health and social care providers or professionals, members of the public and carers, CQC staff, trade bodies, the voluntary sector and from commissioners and Parliamentarians.

Overall, we received strong support for all of the proposals we consulted on. In particular comments were supportive of proposals to regulate independent healthcare consistently across sectors. There was also support for our plans to strengthen our monitoring of independent healthcare services, to become more focused and targeted in our inspections and to introduce ratings.

Read our response and provider guidance at www.cqc.org.uk/nextphase

What are you hearing? We want to hear what you’re hearing! You can provide vital local information that helps CQC decide where to inspect. You can send us your enter and view reports, surveys, comments from the public and any other feedback you gather.

This intelligence can help detect changes in quality at a service, either good or bad. You don’t need to wait until we’re inspecting a service to provide this information to us either, you can send us what you’re hearing at any time.

You can do this via the share your experience form on our website.

You can also call our national customer service centre on 03000 616161 or provide it to your local inspection team.