Care Quality Commission consultation: CQC’s Strategy 2016 to 2021

General Comments

We welcome the opportunity to respond to this consultation about the Care Quality Commission (CQC) five year strategy 2016-21. We offer some general comments, but have not responded to individual consultation questions. 

There are many bodies, both regulatory and non-regulatory, assessing and displaying levels of quality across the NHS in England. We welcome CQC’s commitment to working with others including professional regulators to reduce duplication. We agree it is important that providers can make sense of judgements made by regulators and reconcile them easily in order to take effective action.

We welcome the CQC’s thrust to improve use of data and information. The potential for CQC Insight to ‘highlight critical data’ (pg. 15) to be used with a provider should enable targeted regulatory operations. We would also encourage the CQC to evaluate these indicators against findings over time, to help it identify those that are the most accurate predictors of outcomes. This may help to reduce the volume of data needed and so reduce any unnecessary burden.

In inspection of general practice (pg. 20) it is specifically mentioned that the CQC will work with the General Medical Council (GMC) to improve methods of working with partners, lessening the burden on practices and developing a single view of quality. We encourage the CQC to work with professional regulators in other fields of health and social care to achieve similar goals. The nine professional statutory regulators can offer insight into how providers may act and overlapping issues covered by both professional and system regulation. We would also encourage CQC to work with professional regulators to identify ways in which system regulation can be used to help encourage the conditions within organisations in which health and care professionals are supported to provide good care. We explain the importance of connecting the regulation of people with the regulation of places in our paper Rethinking Regulation.