Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they require to ensure the Care Quality Commission (CQC) updates its digital infrastructure so that statutory notifications of deaths can be automatically aggregated and analysed by a service user’s specific condition; and what assessment it has made of the CQC's response to a Freedom of Information request that it cannot extract data on the deaths of learning disabled or autistic individuals without a manual review of over 133,000 records.

Improving statutory notifications was in scope of the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) transformation programme undertaken between 2021 and 2023. One of the improvements from the programme was an increase in the range of data fields collected as part of notifications for reporting.

Through recent upgrades, it is now possible for the CQC to aggregate and analyse death notifications, including for a person with a learning disability, or an autistic person.

The CQC’s response to the mentioned Freedom of Information request was given under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. The CQC is currently reviewing the response provided to the requester and will contact them directly regarding the information provided to them.