Care Quality Commission (CQC)

Inspections by the Care Quality Commission The Care Quality Commission

(CQC) is the organisation responsible for ensuring that health and social care services in England – including hospitals, care homes, dental practices and GP surgeries – provide safe, high-quality care.

The CQC regularly checks services to ensure they meet national standards for quality and safety, and is in the course of introducing new-style inspections which will rate services as outstanding, good, requiring improvement or inadequate.

What's the standard?

The national standards are set by Parliament and can be found on the CQC website.

How are we doing?

Despite 10 out of our 14 services being rated as good, we have been given an overall trust rating of ‘requires improvement’.

Many areas of good practice were identified and overall, our community health services were given the rating of good.

However, the CQC has assessed 3 of our services as requiring improvement and our adult inpatient mental health services as inadequate. This reflects the huge pressure this inpatient service operates under and that we aren't always able to provide care as quickly as we or our patients would like.

We will now focus on putting right the areas of concern and look forward to a positive re-inspection by the end of this financial year to improve our rating to good across our services.