CQC Future Strategy Consultation. What Are The Issues And How To Solve Them?

What are the main issues facing care services for the next 5 years?

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is developing a new strategy to improve the provision and regulation of care. If you had to respond to the consultation, what would you say and why?

On 7th January 2021, the Care Quality Commission published a formal consultation on their future strategy. As of 22nd January, the consultation opened for feedback on that strategy.

The consultation is running against a backdrop of increased pressures on the care sector due to COVID-19 and a third lockdown.

Do you think that any feedback will be too narrowly focused on COVID and the resultant restrictions rather than a more holistic view of the care system?

The CQC was established as an independent regulator tasked with ensuring health and care services provided people with safe, effective, and high-quality care, and to encourage those services to improve.

However, the organisation of health and social care has evolved over time, so it is now very different from the single provider model that was the prevalent system in place when the CQC was set up in 2009.

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted how important it is for health and social care sectors to work together to deliver coherent and effective care services.

Is it acceptable that it has taken something as serious as a pandemic to highlight the issue of health and social care cooperation and coordination?

And will the highlighting this time be strong enough to engender positive action unlike with previous disease episodes?

The pandemic has also highlighted the inequalities in the provision of health and social care across the country.

As part of the CQC’s remit is improving services, reducing those inequalities is a fundamental part of the new strategy, and thus will likely feature prominently in the consultation now being undertaken.

What would you expect to be other recurring themes or features of feedback given during the consultation period? The new strategy, which feedback from this consultation is designed to refine, is based around four themes. These are:

People and communities - Regulation to be driven by people’s experiences. Focus on concerns of public and local communities.

Smarter regulation - Assessments to be more flexible and dynamic. Updating of ratings more often. Smarter use of data to better target visits.

Safety through learning - Learning and improvement to be the primary response to all safety concerns.

Accelerating improvement - Target the priority areas that need support the most. Improvement within individual services, and in the way they work together as a system.

Enabling people to give feedback and improving the capability and capacity of the CQC to get the most of this feedback is a underpins a lot of this new strategy consultation.

To what extent do you think any feedback given will be used to inform future policy? Will consultation feedback make a tangible difference? As the care ecosystem is changing so rapidly, the CQC is said to understand that it must facilitate and maintain closer contact with people actually performing the roles that they are regulating.

As part of this process, the CQC intends to issue clearer definition of the standards people can expect from their health and care services will be made clearer. These definitions will then be used as the basis for assessing services and any information collected as evidence.

When COVID finally recedes as a pressing issue, do you think that health and social care systems can integrate successfully? Or will the NHS and social care providers represent two distinct and incompatible bureaucratic models?

An aging population means more people with multiple, long-term conditions. As a consequence, delivering care for these people is becoming an increasingly complex task.

Whilst the easy response is always more funding, do you think the government (or a future government) will have the political resolve to fundamentally reform and restructure the health and social care systems from how they exist today?

Please let us know what you think in the comments.

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