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Select committee inquiry

Care Quality Commission inquiry

Closed

Public Accounts Committee · Opened 3 November 2017 · Closed 3 November 2017

Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗

What the inquiry looked at

“The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. It is sponsored by the Department of Health and inspects hospitals, adult social care providers, and primary medical services such as GPs. A recent report from the National Audit Office (NAO) that sought to address problems identified by the NAO and by this Committee in the previous Parliament found that the CQC’s performance has improved. It has reduced staff vacancies and completed an inspection regime of 28,000 locations. However, there are outstanding concerns about the CQC’s information systems, and timeliness in publishing reports. Providers inspected by the CQC have some residual apprehensions about consistency of inspections, which CQC is trying to address by training staff. The NAO also identified risks around the CQC’s plan to base more of its regulation activities around risk-based information and data, which would require good-quality and reliable digital systems. Delivering change like this whilst taking on new responsibilities increases risks to the organisation. The Public Accounts Committee will ask representatives from the Department of Health and Care Quality Commission about improvements made within the CQC, outstanding risks and how they will be managed, and what has been learned from resolving the Committee’s previous concerns.”

The committee's words, from the inquiry page on parliament.uk ↗.

What it found

In the committee's words, from the summary of 24th Report - Care Quality Commission: regulating health and social care ↗

The Care Quality Commission (the Commission) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. It plays a vital role in ensuring people receive safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care. This is the third time this Committee has reported on the Commission since 2012 and it has improved significantly over this period. There remain areas where the Commission needs to improve its current performance. It does not make inspection reports available to the public quickly enough following an inspection and it needs to improve how it interacts with and regulates GP practices. It also has a number of challenges ahead. With health and care providers under severe financial pressure, the Commission’s workload is likely to increase if services deteriorate. The Commission needs to monitor this closely and understand the impact on its staff requirements. The Commission wants to move to a more intelligence-driven regulatory approach, but to do so it must improve its information systems. It also has more work to do to ensure it has the wide range of intelligence it needs to identify early warning signs of poor care. Since our evidence session, Sir David Behan has announced his retirement. The new Chief Executive will have a big task to ensure the Commission is able to tackle the big challenges that are on the horizon.

What the government said

No government response is linked to this report.

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How the inquiry ran

Each dot is a dated item listed on this page, from the inquiry's opening on 3 November 2017 to 30 April 2019.

  1. Oral evidence 13 Dec 2017
  2. Report 9 Mar 2018
  3. Correspondence 3 letters

What it recommended

The committee's recommendations are not listed here yet. Read them in 24th Report - Care Quality Commission: regulating health and social care ↗ on parliament.uk.

Evidence

Oral evidence sessions 1

Correspondence 3 letters