Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how (a) residents, (b) patients, (c) clinical commissioning groups and (d) NHS England can assess the standard and quality of care offered by an NHS body that has not yet received a Care Quality Commission inspection rating.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care providers in England. All providers of regulated activities, including National Health Service and independent providers, have to register with the CQC and follow a set of fundamental standards of safety and quality below which care should never fall. The CQC monitor, inspect and regulate services to make sure they meet fundamental standards. This gives patients and the public a fair, balanced and easy to understand assessment of the performance of a provider.

During 2014, the CQC progressively introduced a new inspection regime for all providers. Since the CQC introduced its new inspection regime in 2014 it has issued ratings for the majority of providers. All remaining NHS hospitals and general practitioner providers will be inspected by March 2017.

Some of the providers that do not have ratings have already been inspected within the new inspection regime but at a time when ratings were not completed. For all providers that were inspected in this way, the CQC has published an assessment of care quality that has been designed to be helpful to patients and the public.

Other sources of information on care quality include the MyNHS website, NHS Choices, quality accounts, specialised services dashboards published by NHS England, and the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme.