Hospitals to face more frequent, less detailed inspections under CQC plans

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has announced that hospitals will face more frequent but less detailed on-site inspections, under the regulator’s new plans.

The CQC will also move to allow up to five years to lapse between inspections of the best performing GP practices. However, for hospitals where there are still major concerns, the CQC will undertake a full and rigorous inspection.

Inspection teams will be smaller to reflect the focus on core services. Hospitals will also be expected to provide extensive data to the CQC for their yearly reviews, with the regulator set to closely examine the views of patients and carers.

The new strategy said: “Our inspections will be smaller and more frequent, with a maximum interval between them based on previous inspection findings, our ratings and wider intelligence about the quality of care of providers.

“We will have a targeted approach to inspection that focuses our efforts both on areas of risk and where quality is most likely to have changed or improved. Although we will retain large-scale comprehensive inspections where we believe these are needed, we will move to a targeted and tailored approach focused on core services in most cases.

“This will mean more frequent inspections on a smaller scale and a greater reliance on unannounced or short notice visits.”

David Behan, the CQC’s chief executive, said: “We’re developing our approach to reflect changes in the sectors we regulate - effective regulation doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

“But our role remains the same: consistently assessing quality of care using the information we and others gather; using what we know to help drive change and improvement; and acting swiftly to ensure people are protected from poor care.

‘Inspection will always be crucial to our understanding of quality but we’ll increasingly be getting more and better information from the public and providers and using it alongside inspections to provide a trusted, responsive, independent view of quality that is regularly updated and that will be invaluable to people who provide services as well as those who use them.

“And we’ll make more use of focused unannounced inspections which target the areas where our insight suggests risk is greatest or quality is improving - with ratings updated where we find changes.”