News / Birmingham’s first as CQC ponders UoR approach

Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has become the first dedicated children’s trust to be rated outstanding by the Care Quality Commission.

The regulator announced the overall outstanding rating in February following an inspection last year. 

Although it is the first stand-alone children’s hospital trust to receive the top rating, other children’s services have been similarly recognised. 

Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust last year received an outstanding rating for its children’s services, which are delivered by its Evelina Children’s Hospital on the St Thomas’s site.

The Birmingham trust was rated ‘outstanding’ in terms of providing caring, effective and responsive services, ‘good’ in terms of being well-led and ‘requires improvement’ on delivery of safe services. 

‘The hard work of staff across the trust is exemplary and making a real difference to the lives of children, young people and their parents across the West Midlands,’ said CQC chief inspector Sir Mike Richards (top right). ‘The trust should be proud of this outcome.’

February also saw the end of consultation by the CQC and NHS Improvement on their proposed new use of resources assessment, which would provide a broader assessment than the finance assessment currently used in the single oversight framework. Initially this would be presented alongside the CQC’s existing quality rating. 

But the consultation identified possible future options – combining use of resources with the five existing questions to produce an overall rating or creating a three-part rating based on quality, leadership and use of resources.

The HFMA’s response to the consultation saw benefits in both approaches, but suggested the split assessment would give an increasing focus to resources and leadership. Other respondents have raised concerns. For example mental health charity Mind were strongly opposed to giving an equal weighting to financial capability.