Parliamentary Written Answer (Correction)

Thursday 16th May 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anna Soubry)]

I regret that the written answer given to the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on 17 April 2013, Official Report column 418W, contained some incomplete figures in the table.

It has been brought to my attention that the information provided by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in the table in the original answer did not contain every instance where information of concern about an organisation was received by the CQC. The table below shows the full number of times information of concern was received. I have also taken this opportunity to clarify that the numbers provided in the table are for all information of concern raised about an organisation, and do not specifically relate to children’s heart surgery.

The corrected answer is as follows.



Under the Health and Social Care Act 2008, the CQC does not have the responsibility for investigating specific complaints about providers. The CQC is responsible for checking that providers that are registered meet standards of quality and safety. The CQC’s role does not include investigating individual complaints about these services. Under the NHS complaints procedure, formal complaints are raised with the service provider in the first instance. The CQC’s predecessor, the Healthcare Commission, did have responsibility for second stage complaints, once local resolution had been unsuccessful. This responsibility ceased on 1 April 2009.



When the CQC receives information of concern from people who use services, their relatives and members of the public, it uses the information to inform its inspection programme and the quality and risk profile of the service provider.

The CQC has provided the following information:



The following table shows the number of times information of concern has been received by the CQC under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 for specified hospitals by location or provider, by fiscal year. The table shows data for all locations at each provider. Due to the manner in which CQC records this data, it cannot determine the nature of the concern, which may not therefore be related to children’s heart surgery.