News / CQC on course with inspections

The Care Quality Commission is on course to deliver its target to inspect all hospitals by December 2015, chief inspector of hospitals Professor Mike Richards told the HFMA FT Finance conference in Brighton.

'It is a big challenge but we are on target for December 2015,' he told delegates. More than 50 trusts have been through the inspection process to date and Professor Richards said that credibility and consistency were 'our greatest challenges'. However, he said that achieving the target was dependent on 'having the right resources' and that the inspection body needed to recruit significant numbers of inspectors, many of which he hoped might come on secondment from the NHS.

The chief inspector said the overall high level findings from inspections so far were that compassionate care was alive and well in the NHS, but there was a wide range of quality. This variation existed between hospitals, within hospitals and sometimes within individual services.

The inspection process involves inspectors asking five key questions about key services and individual hospital sites. These include if services are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. Ratings are awarded – again by service, site and at organisation level – across four levels: outstanding; good; requires improvement; and inadequate.

In general Professor Richards said that inspectors had found staffing levels were 'adequate'. 'Up till now, people haven't generally been using acuity tools, but we are hoping this is changing rapidly,' he said. In part this is likely to be a response to a general increased focus on safe staffing levels and specific work from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to develop guidance and approve tools on staffing levels in acute wards.

Where there were staffing shortages, these were most frequently in accident and emergency departments and medical wards.

Overall he said that the effectiveness domain was not well measured by providers, with critical care being the notable exception. And he said to date there was a 'good correlation between the safety assessment and the overall assessment'.