Care Quality Commission (CQC)
The Care Quality Commission (CQC), England’s independent regulator of health and social care ensures fundamental standards of quality and safety are met and sets out what good and outstanding care looks like. Then, through inspections, ratings and published reports, it encourages care services to meet those standards. The CQC inspect organisations through five Key Lines of Enquiry (KLoE) to determine whether:
- we are safe.
- we are effective.
- we are caring.
- we are responsive to people’s needs.
- we are well led.
In June 2020, the CQC undertook a focused inspection. As their concerns were related to specific risks, they did not inspect any core services or all of
the key lines of enquiry which means that the previous ratings issued following a full inspection in 2019 remained in place. Well-led, the focus of the inspection, was deemed to still be’ Inadequate’ and on the basis of the inspection, EEAST was issued with three improvement requirement notices and six ’must dos’ relating to five areas of concern; recruitment, use of independent ambulance providers, handling of complaints, safeguarding processes and the culture of the organisation. You can read the full report on the CQC website.
Following this focused inspection, the Trust identified 174 actions to address the issues, which were focused under the following twelve themes;
- Safeguarding
- Allegations against staff
- Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) renewals
- Pre-employment check compliance
- Concerns, grievances, disciplinaries
- Human Resources (HR) governance
- Private Ambulance Service (PAS) provider governance
- Protection from poor behaviours
- Actions taken against bad actors
- Triangulation of external advice
- Improvement oversight
- NHSI support plan improvements
To date 159/174 actions have been completed, of the remaining fifteen, five relate to longer term projects such as cultural change and changes within our reporting system Datix to ensure more robust triangulation of themes between incidents and patient experience.
At the time of compiling this report, the Trust is currently being inspected around its core services which began with initial visits to some of our emergency operations centres and ambulance stations on 11th April and we are currently pulling together a wealth of information at their request. A focused ‘Well-Led’ inspection will also take place on the 4th and 5th May 2022, with a full report of both being published after this date
Next Page: Department of Health Core Quality Indicators