Saturday 18 June 2011

CQC welcomes GP Registration extension


On Friday 17th June, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) issued a statement in support of the Department of Health's published proposals on changes to the GP CQC registration process.

The Care Quality Commission stated that they will work with the Department of Health and with stakeholders to ensure any changes are clear, and they have confirmed that they will be writing to all affected providers.

The CQC has asked the Department of Health to extend GP practice registration beyond the current deadline. This requested extension is for one year; moving the final registration deadline from April 2012 to April 2013. However it is still proposed that all providers whose sole or main purpose is NHS GP out-of-hours services or walk-in centres will still need to be registered by 1 April 2012.

The aim of the delay is to try to improve the process for GPs, to give the Commission more opportunity to embed compliance monitoring in the sectors they already regulate, and to ensure registration is more closely aligned with accreditation schemes.

At this time the CQC have confirmed that, 'there are no plans to change the scope of regulation - all NHS primary care medical services will have to register, but the timing of that registration for GP practices may change.'

No comments: