Recommendation 3

We welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to include in the Bill, at our suggestion, provisions to enable the Care Quality Commission to undertake ratings of Integrated Care Systems. As an independent regulator it must for the CQC to decide how such inspections and ratings work but we note that the success of the system to date has been partly because the core domains (safe, effective, caring, responsiveness and governance) are largely patient-facing, so it is essential such an approach is maintained including a domain that focuses on safety and quality and is named as such. We believe within these domains it should be possible to include assessment of delivery of core NHS England and DHSC objectives so that there is alignment of objectives across the system.

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