The future of healthcare regulation – have your say
08 September 2020
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CQC inspections are resuming, and soon we will see some changes to their focus. In this blog, our CEO shares his thoughts on the expected changes and urges healthcare providers to have their say…
Right now
The CQC are introducing a Transitional Regulatory Approach from September. The idea is that the new approach is more flexible and includes learning from the COVID-19 response with the best of the CQC’s existing methods. They plan to improve their purpose through their quality of delivery, which includes visiting providers.
As part of their monitoring approach, the CQC are planning on looking at a wider topic range to use all the information available. This will enable them to see risk and quality much more clearly. They plan to develop the approach through the Emergency Support Framework (ESF) to not only cover the Key Lines of Enquiry but also specifically focus on safety, access and leadership.
Plans for the future
The CQC acknowledge that assessments of care need to better people’s experiences. They are developing a new strategy ready to launch in May 2021, and to do this they have been discussing with the public, providers and their stakeholders to find out which issues are most important. They have discovered 4 main points:
1. Meeting people’s needs
Transforming how they collect and understand individual’s experiences, especially those who face inequalities, the CQC will ensure that services meet their needs. The key to this is empowering people to drive change by providing information in the right way.
2. Promoting safe care for people
Working towards a universal safety culture throughout health and care. Providers should actively speak up at all levels in order to pinpoint areas of priority where safety risks are, and applying standards for improvement.
3. Smarter regulation
The focus here is on gathering and using data more efficiently. The CQC say it’s important for care users to build relationships with providers so a more immediate picture of care can be captured.
4. Driving and supporting improvement
The CQC can do more with their knowledge to drive improvements in the quality of care. They will use their unique baseline understanding as shown in their annual State of Care report.
How to have your say
In January 2021, there will be a full public consultation on the CQC’s strategy. They are collecting views ahead of this to help by holding webinars, a platform for digital participation, and providing bulletins for other opportunities to be heard.
Thoughts from our CEO
Paul Johnson, CEO at Radar Healthcare, says: “We welcome the collaborative approach to planning the future of CQC regulation and inspection. We’re especially interested in understanding how digital will play a key role in achieving smarter regulation – in order to gather and use data more efficiently, there needs to be a shift away from manual methods such as paper and spreadsheets, towards digital software. The right software is capable of automatically digesting information into useful and actionable data.
We support this evolution as it will enable health and social care providers to improve their quality of care without the need to spend time collecting and analysing data. We urge healthcare providers to get involved in the consultation right now and in January.”