Community Voice Health

The mysteries of the Care Quality Commission were unravelled at the July meeting of The Community Voice, in Northwood, when Tracy-Jane Norton was guest speaker.  She explained that the CQC amalgamated the   Healthcare Commission, the Commission of Social Care Inspection and the Mental Health Act Commission, and it hopes to build on the best work of all three.  For the first time common quality standards are applied to providers of health and social services.

The CQC’s vision is to encourage high quality health and social care and to support people to live healthy and independent lives, based on informed decisions that are responsive to their individual needs.

CQC sees itself as a critical friend, which is a two-way process.  It judges Local Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, which arrange services for their communities, and also the organisations providing care.  It assesses both services and pathways of care, and it is concerned with protection of the rights of people detained under the Mental Health Act.  It ensures essential common quality standards are observed and that health and adult social services work together. 

CQC gathers evidence from service users, carers, the public, national surveys, regulators and from its own inspections and investigation.  It has the ability to administer fines, issue public warnings, to close unsatisfactory facilities and not to register providers that fail to meet its standards.  From April 2009 it registers NHS providers and from April 2010 it will also register health and social care providers and probably Primary Care providers too from April 2011.

Human rights are at the heart of CQC’s work.  It expects its information to be independent, fair, accurate, easy to access, and it hopes that it will be trusted, so that it will help people to judge the quality of their local health and adult social care services.

CQC operates in nine regions, matching Government Office and Strategic Health Authority boundaries, and in 150 local areas matching PCT and Local Authority boundaries.

More information is available on the CQC website:   www.cqc.org.uk

 Joan

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