CQC unveils community services inspection regime

The regulator said its inspections would be carried out by larger, more specialist teams to include professional inspectors, clinicians, and “experts by experience” – people with experience of using care services. 

The CQC document outlining the approach also reveals the five providers which will be in the first wave of community inspections between January and March.

These are: Bridgewater Community Healthcare Trust, Central Essex Community Services, Derbyshire Community Health Services Trust, Solent Trust and St Georges Healthcare Trust.

The regulator said it had chosen “five large, complex organisations that provide a range of services” to kick off the new programme. This would be followed by a second pilot phase, and then the learning from these inspections would be used to roll out the model in full from October 2014.

The programme will be led by chief inspector of hospitals Sir Mike Richards. He said the CQC had “not given enough specific attention to community health services in the past”, but was “determined to strengthen [its] oversight of the sector”.

New inspections will have a greater focus on services provided in community clinics and people’s homes, not just community hospitals, the regulator indicated. The CQC wants to improve its “understanding of how well services are governed across widely dispersed locations and teams” – a characteristic feature of the sector.

As with its regulation of other sectors, the CQC will focus on whether services are safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well-led. They will also rate services on the same four point scale from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’, although the regulator will not introduce ratings until after its first wave of pilot inspections.

Where a provider delivers health services across different sectors (such as acute and community services), the CQC expects to carry out a joint inspection but to rate services separately, while still giving the trust an overall rating.

For each community provider the CQC will inspect four core services which are also likely to receive separate ratings. These are services for children and families, adults with long-term conditions, adults requiring community inpatient services, and people receiving end-of-life care.

Michael Scott, chair of the NHS Confederation’s Community Health Services Forum, said he was “pleased to see a dedicated approach to community regulation and inspection” and that his forum “welcomed it”.  

He said he was pleased the CQC recognised some of the differences of the sector, such as the fact that it worked across disperse geographies. However it was “a little silent” on how it would “inspect work in people’s homes while maintaining the privacy and dignity of the people involved”, he added.

Mr Scott said the forum were working with the CQC “to [put] our ideas into how that might happen”, and was also supporting the regulator with “how we measure what’s good in community services”.