Inspections should not resume until after winter

The NHS Confederation has claimed that the routine inspections of hospitals and other health and care providers should be paused until after winter.

Writing to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, the NHS Confederation says that a pause on inspections is needed if providers are going to be able to focus on the backlog of treatment that has built up in recent months, as well as address issues like exhaustion among staff, while managing the ongoing threat from coronavirus.

Hancock recently outlined his vision for ‘busting bureaucracy’ and health leaders now want to see this backed up with a major shift towards a lighter-touch and more agile system of regulation over the longer term.

The NHS Confederation calls for a continuation of the lighter-touch approach to governance and regulation that has been a feature of coronavirus, which has enabled them to focus on delivering care to patients and to work more efficiently, with less interference from national bodies and reduced requirements for meetings and paperwork that add little to patient care.

Acknowledging how scrutiny is vital, given how critical patient safety is to the delivery of health services, the NHS Confederation believes there will be broad support for the recent comments from Ian Trenholm, chief executive of the Care Quality Commission, which outline the regulator’s desire to reduce the burden on providers. But they believe the government will need to go further and take this opportunity to review the regulatory burden placed on providers from NHS England and NHS Improvement and other national bodies, as well as the CQC.

Danny Mortimer, deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “Healthcare needs regulation and oversight, but NHS leaders want to see a radical shift away from the excessive paperwork and other reporting requirements that have become an industry in recent years. All too often, these only serve to provide false reassurance, rather than enhancing patient safety. The experience of Covid-19 has shown what can be achieved when we have a lighter touch approach in place.

“The health secretary was right to identify this as an area in need of reform. But successive governments have promised to cut red tape while actually presiding over and instigating an expansion in the bureaucratic burden on providers. In the immediate term, we need to put this in reverse and suspend routine inspections until after winter, when the lessons from the pandemic can be put into practice.

“Ultimately, we need a more risk-based, proportionate and intelligence-driven approach to regulation that fosters innovation and does not weigh providers down with reporting requirements that take them away from delivering high quality care to patients.”