The Way the CQC Regulates Independent Healthcare Under Review - Have Your Say!

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is inviting people to give their views on proposals to change its approach to regulating independent healthcare services, such as independent acute hospitals, independent doctors and clinics, online services and independent substance misuse services in England.

Proposals include:

• Plans to introduce quality ratings following inspections for independent healthcare services. 
• Changes to the regulation of independent healthcare services, including the scheduling and intensity of its inspections and how the CQC will monitor providers. 
• Improved systems for gathering intelligence to monitor the quality of care including the development of ‘CQC Insight’– a data monitoring tool currently in use for NHS hospital trusts and primary care providers – to help inform decisions about when and what to inspect, and a new regular provider information request to support and feed into CQC’s monitoring of services in between inspections. 
• The phased introduction of a more targeted approach to inspection that is more responsive to risk and improvement and involves greater focus on leadership – similar to that introduced for NHS trusts, adult social care and primary care providers.
• Changes to the core services that the CQC assesses during its inspections of independent acute hospitals and community health services. Including assessing and rating ‘outpatients’ and ‘diagnostic imaging’ services separately and combining the existing core services of ‘medicine’ and ‘surgery’ into a single ‘inpatient’ core service to better reflect the way these services are organised and managed at many independent hospitals. 
• Introducing ‘community single specialty’ as a new core service for some independent community healthcare services. 

Commenting on the proposals, Sir David Behan, Chief Executive at CQC, said “The consultation sets out our plans to evolve our current approach to regulating independent healthcare services to be more focused, targeted and intelligence driven in line with our strategy and the approach we have introduced already for NHS hospitals, adult social care services and primary care.

“Our proposals are based on the learning from our inspections of the sector over the past three years and feedback from independent healthcare providers about our regulation, which will continue to focus on ensuring people receive safe, high-quality and compassionate care and on encouraging improvement. We welcome the further feedback that this consultation will bring.”

The consultation is open for eight weeks closing on Friday 23 March 2018. The CQC will formally respond to the feedback provided later in the year - click here to get involved.