Comments sought on CQC for parliamentary evidence session

The Parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee are planning to hold an evidence session with the Chair, Chief Executive and Chief Inspectors of the Care Quality Commission to discuss its annual State of Health and Adult Social Care Services report. Whilst a full call for evidence is not being issued in connection with this session, the Committee have asked for written submissions from organisations or individuals regarding the CQC’s role and performance.

Our GP Support team has for some time now been pulling together a dossier of concerns/queries about CQC inspections and issues that have been shared with us by practices. Some of the complaints are anonymous and some are from practices who have given us consent to identify them when we raise the issues to CQC. We have not fed back this information to CQC yet as we are a) still in the process of collating it and b) planning to do this as part of a new series of meetings that we are about to set up with the new London CQC leads.

Londonwide LMCs is considering sharing key themes and issues with the Select Committee in order to inform this evidence session, and would welcome any additional reflections or comments from you regarding your experiences with CQC, particularly regarding: CQC practice and processes; perceived differences in inspection locally; information requests and management; blurring of requirements and recommendations (particularly regarding staff training); “testing” or administrative governance arrangements, and; poor information management within CQC. Any information provided to us will only be shared with the Select Committee in an anonymous and/ or aggregated form, unless a practice gives explicit consent to be identified.

All submissions must be received by the Committee by Thursday 17 October at the latest, so we would appreciate your comments by Wednesday 7 October to comms@lmc.org.uk, copying in gpsupport@lmc.org.uk.

The date of the oral evidence session will be confirmed in due course, further information can be found on the Select Committee home page.

Last updated : 19 Sep 2019

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