Asked by: Lord Blunkett (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the Care Quality Commission's risk register relating to primary care, when primary care practices were informed of their ratings; when national and local media were informed of the ratings relating to specific practices nationally or in their locality; and what rights primary care practices have to appeal against the theoretical assessments undertaken nationally without those specific practices having been inspected or given the opportunity to review the data on which the risk assessment was made.
Answered by Norman Lamb
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. The CQC has provided the following information.
The CQC published its first round of Intelligent Monitoring for general practices on 17 November 2014. Intelligent Monitoring analyses a range of indicators (including surveys and official statistics) to create priority bands for inspection. The bandings are then used to help inform where the CQC prioritise its inspections. The CQC will also use the indicators to raise questions about the quality of care; they will not be used on their own to make final judgements about the quality of care.
The CQC informed all providers of the launch of general practitioner Intelligent Monitoring with an email that was sent out on 14 November 2014 (with no data included). All band 1 GP practices received a separate email on 14 November 2014 informing them that they were in the highest priority band for inspection.
The CQC engaged with approximately 400 GP practices prior to the launch of GP Intelligent Monitoring, including sharing the data and hosting a series of meetings. A national media release was sent out on the morning of 17 November.
The CQC will listen and respond to concerns raised by GP practices. The CQC’s formal appeals processes are for the regulatory judgements the CQC makes and Intelligent Monitoring, is not a regulatory judgement. This comparative information is already in the public domain and known to the practice. The CQC publish this information to be open and transparent about what it knows about providers.
The CQC plans to update this information every three months so that it can continue to respond to issues as they emerge and to share these with providers and the public. The CQC will be undertaking additional testing and engagement to continually improve indicators to inform this work, and will align its definitions of indicators as far as possible with those used by partner bodies such as NHS England and Public Health England.
Within the next two years, the CQC will have inspected and rated every general practice in England as Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, or Inadequate to help people make informed choices about their care and encourage improvement in quality.