The Care Quality Commission has been strongly criticised by its own board after admitting to making thousands of errors in its handling of safeguarding worries.
A report to the watchdog’s committee this week revealed it had 11,000 safeguarding “alerts” and “concerns” registered on its system for which there was no record of any action by its officers.
Safeguarding worries flagged up to the CQC are registered as “alerts” when it is the first agency receiving the warning and “concerns” when information has already been supplied to another organisation.
This widespread failure could mean in some instances that no action had been taken in response to safeguarding warnings at all, raising fears that vulnerable people are at risk.
The debacle also means the CQC has fallen massively short of its targets for handling alerts and concerns.
Over the past six months, only 17 per cent of concerns have been responded to within two days against a target of 95 per cent, while only 44 per cent of alerts were responded to within a day, against the same target.
While an internal audit of 325 alerts indicated the issue was largely a failure of inspectors to record their actions on its system, board members urged officers against dismissing the problem as “just a data issue”.
Non-executive director Paul Corrigan, a health policy adviser to the last Labour administration, said: “If a thing isn’t recorded it hasn’t happened. That’s what we say to other organisations.”
CQC chief executive David Behan had told the board that it was “getting to” the conclusion that “this is a data issue rather than an issue that reflects that there’s a lack of action”.
Papers seen by the board said there remained cases where the CQC “cannot yet be confident that there will have been any action taken”.
The regulator is yet to check 4,000 outstanding safeguarding concerns which it received between April and September this year, the papers seen by the board added.
The CQC’s board papers admitted its “failure to record our activity properly” was “not acceptable”.
It said it had taken action to “stabilise” the situation by helping inspection staff improve their understanding about how to record safeguarding activity and by updating its information systems.
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