Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether the local hon. Member would ordinarily be one of the stakeholder consultees to a Care Quality Commission Quality Report.

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

The CQC has provided the following information about Members of Parliament (MPs) involvement in its inspection process for National Health Service acute providers.

CQC informs MPs of its plans for scheduled inspections around three months in advance of those inspections taking place. The views of members of the public are sought through local listening events, which local MPs are also invited to attend. Listening events are organised to coincide with the start of an inspection.

MPs and members of the public are informed of the dates as soon as the arrangements are in place. MPs are usually informed via email and are also able to send information to CQC for consideration as part of future inspections even if an inspection of a specific trust is not currently planned.

Once an inspection report has been finalised it is taken to a quality summit where the report’s findings are presented to the trust, NHS England and local stakeholders who will be directly involved in providing ongoing practical support to the trust.

Attendees receive copies of CQC reports in advance of the quality summit. MPs are not invited to quality summits though they usually receive an embargoed copy of the report via email the day before publication. An offer of more detailed information or a briefing is made at the same time.