PERFORMANCE: Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is among the first 18 hospital trusts to be test the Care Quality Commission’s new inspection regime.

The CQC’s new chief inspector of hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards, is introducing changes to the way hospitals in England are inspected, as announced earlier this week.

Bigger inspection teams will be headed up by clinical and other experts that include trained members of the public.

They will spend longer inspecting hospitals and cover every site that delivers acute services and eight key services areas: A&E; maternity, paediatrics; acute medical and surgical pathways; care for the frail elderly; end of life care; and outpatients.

The inspections will be a mixture of unannounced and announced and they will include inspections in the evenings and weekends.

Sir Mike will decide whether hospitals are to be rated as outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate.

He has identified 18 NHS trusts representing the variation of care in hospitals in England. These are divided into “high risk”, “low risk” and an intermediate group with a “variety of risk points in between” the other two categories.

Frimley Park is among the six trusts in the group considered to be low risk.