I am concerned at Michele Hanson’s article (How will care home inspections get any better with this weedy new system?, 28 September). I welcome debate and constructive criticism – we can and will improve our approach. But she makes a number of sweeping statements regarding CQC’s adult social care inspection regime which are unbalanced and unfounded.
Thursday 1 October marks a year since we launched a brand new regulatory system for monitoring, inspecting and rating all adult social care services across England. This addressed many of the problems previously identified that our inspections were insufficiently thorough. It is a requirement for anyone expressing an interest in becoming an inspector to be able to evidence appropriate knowledge, skills and background in health and social care. Inspectors undertake a comprehensive induction, have ongoing learning and development opportunities and are supported by a management system that assures the quality of their work.
Specialist teams, including people who use services, their carers or relatives – known as “experts by experience”, together with specialist advisers – now support our inspection work to really get under the skin of adult social care services better than ever before. We do not ignore adult social care inspections from one year to the next. Information provided by people using services, their families and carers, as well as staff who raise concerns, with us all help determine when we inspect.
Our inspection teams follow specific and clearly defined prompts called key lines of enquiry (KLOEs) to gather inspection evidence. We assess a minimum of 16 mandatory KLOEs during a comprehensive care home inspection – not two as Michele Hanson suggests.
We have made a commitment to rate all adult social care services by September 2016 as “outstanding”, “good”, “requires improvement” and “inadequate” so that the public can be clear about the quality of care provided. To date, 7% of services have been rated as inadequate, 34% require improvement, 58% are good and 1% outstanding. Our enforcement action as a proportion of inspections undertaken has nearly doubled, demonstrating that we will, and do, take action to tackle poor care when we find it.
I am confident that CQC has made significant progress to becoming the strong regulator the adult social care sector needs, and the public have every right to expect.
Andrea Sutcliffe
Chief inspector of adult social care, CQC
