Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the robustness of the methodology used in the Care Quality Commission's Intelligent monitoring process and of the quality of the management of that process.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. The CQC is responsible for developing and consulting on its methodology for assessing whether providers are meeting the registration requirements.

Following feedback from national and local stakeholders, and working with NHS England, on 5 December the CQC completed a comprehensive review of the general practitioner (GP) intelligent monitoring (IM) data and, as a result, made a number of changes to the IM tool. Concerns were identified with five indicators. The first of these was an indicator about the ability to get a GP appointment, which has consequently been removed from GP IM. Separately, and also after publication, NHS England advised the CQC about concerns with the data that NHS England had provided for four indicators. For three, revisions were needed to the indicator construction to align with other NHS England publications, and for the remaining one there was a data error. Following the discovery of the mistakes, the CQC’s approach has been to apologise, to address the problem, and learn lessons to prevent a repeat occurrence.

The CQC is now reviewing the quality assurance of all of its outward facing analyses to ensure any necessary actions are taken to prevent a recurrence of the mistakes made. An internal audit by the CQC is also in the process of being commissioned.