The Care Quality Commission is the independent regulator of health and social care in England. CQC aim is to make sure better care is provided for everyone, whether that’s in hospital, in care homes, in people’s own homes, or elsewhere.
CQC regulates health and adult social care services, whether provided by the NHS, local authorities, private companies or voluntary organisations. CQC protects the rights of people detained under the Mental Health Act.
CQC makes sure that essential common quality standards are being met where care is provided and promotes the rights and interests of people who use services.
CQC's work brings together independent regulation of health, mental health and adult social care. Before 1 April 2009, this work was carried out by the Healthcare Commission, the Mental Health Act Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. These organisations no longer exist.
Main activities:
-
Registration of health and social care providers to ensure they are meeting essential common quality standards
-
Monitoring and inspection of all health and adult social care
-
Using our enforcement powers, such as fines and public warnings or closures, if standards are not being met
-
Improving health and social care services by undertaking regular reviews of how well those who arrange and provide services locally are performing and special reviews on particular care services, pathways of care or themes where there are particular concerns about quality
-
Reporting the outcomes of our work so that people who use services have information about the quality of their local health and adult social care services. It helps those who arrange and provide services to see where improvement is needed and learn from each other about what works best.
How it is done
Find out what CQC's visions and values are, who runs organisation and why the commission was formed.
"We ask people to tell us about their experiences of care services and to give us their views. We make sure they are at the heart of our reports and reviews. In some cases we involve patients and their carers directly in working alongside our inspectors to give an expert user view of services.
People want hospitals, care homes, GP practices and social service providers to work together well. If things go wrong it's often at the crossover point of those services. Because we are one regulator we can look at the whole range of services and make sure they improve how well they're working together for the benefit of people receiving care.
Human rights are at the heart of our work. We promote and protect the rights and interests of everyone who uses health and adult social care, particularly the most vulnerable, for example people who are held under the Mental Health Act.
We make use of information and data to so that we can keep a watch of what is happening inside health and social care systems as well as across both health and social care and alert us to where a pattern of incidents indicates that something untoward may be happening.
Information which is not based on numbers (known as qualitative information), such as comments from people who have used a service, is treated with the same rigour as data (information based on numbers) to make sure that we make more consistent use of all our information to enable us to spot patterns of incidents indicating that there could be a problem."
For more information visit www.cqc.org.uk.
