Care Quality Commission

A major Surrey hospital has been ordered to make rapid improvements after a healthcare watchdog inspection downgraded its emergency and medical services.

The Care Quality Commission's latest audit for East Surrey Hospital in Redhill saw the two departments' overall ratings drop from good to require improvement over several concerns noted by inspectors.

In addition, the emergency department's safety record received an inadequate score and the report saying that this means people are at risk of avoidable harm.

The Care Quality Commission's South East Deputy Hospital's lead, Amanda Williams, said we rated the safety of urgent and emergency care as inadequate and issued a warning notice requiring urgent action to reduce the risk of harm to people.

The Trust now needs to ensure that the dedication shown by staff is matched by the systems that keep people safe.

We've told leaders where we expect to see rapid improvements and will continue to monitor the Trust closely to ensure people are kept safe in the meantime.

She sits on my stakeholder group, been talking to her about what data might we get.

I've got some reasonably useful information from CQC, but Henrietta is quite clear that by and large, it's not possible to find safety data across the system that relates to any staff group.

So this is indicating that, you know, it's maps, but her perspective is any staff group, it's not easy.

And that's because mostly patient safety incidents are about the team.

I don't, in a way, think we need to sort of worry about a lack of spaces into which we could expand.

The problem always is making sure that the activity and the output is relevant, and we've heard about relevance of all of these things to date, increasingly it's difficult for services to make the case to be part of the network because they have to pay a fee to do so and times are hard and so we have to ensure that having membership and potentially achieving accreditation is valued by organisations and one of the ways I suppose that we you know it's always been a tension within the CQC but one of the ways of doing that is to think about the relationship with the hospital inspectorates the CQC you know it's a different thing a quality improvement network as opposed to an inspectorate and these are different cultures and they're achieving different things but it is certainly the case having kind of worked in both that The CQC have a positive attitude towards services that have got their nice certificate of CCQI accreditation on the wall.

It does help.

And given that the CQC are also moving to doing more arm's length inspections and using data, actually, I think that probably is an opportunity that should be further explored.

And in my world, in mental health rehabilitation, we don't just work in inpatient rehabilitation units.

We also work in supported accommodation services with community rehab teams providing the clinical input to people living in those settings.

But I don't think it would be something that would be unpopular, quite the opposite.

I think many of the conversations and the work we've done over the years with mental health supported accommodation providers suggest that they would really quite welcome having seen network to share good practice and also to you know more formalize standards a bit more because that's a field where one person's 24-hour supported housing is somebody else's floating outreach you know the nomenclature and the actual model of care is very loose in that in that area so I think we could do a lot there.

Most people with OCD are very capable of understanding the implications and the risks and the benefits of giving their informed consent.

But before we do any sort of surgery for mental health disorders, there is a Mental Health Act that requires us to apply to the Mental Health Board of the Care Quality Commission.

That's a governmental body, a para-governmental body.

And the job of that commission is number one, to make sure that that individual has received all other reasonable therapies before putting them through neurosurgery and that they do understand the risks and the benefits and they're not being coerced by the doctors or by their family to undergo a procedure that they don't want to go through.

I think it's nice for the person and for the team treating that person for there to be clarity.

What happens then is that if you've got international people, if the surgery is happening here, you are still subject to UK law.

So we still need to refer those people to the Care Quality Commission.

And there is a process.

And then they'll get a training company in once a year just to kind of really go through it with everyone, but just kind of keeping it fresh in everybody's mind, which is a really good example to kind of set for your staff.

So in health and social care and even in education, Ofsted regulated or Care Quality Commission regulated is actually part of the mandatory requirements.

Okay.

And you find that, you know, the different ways to do things, isn't it? Sometimes people are just trying to tick a box by doing an e-learning course.

Hello, this is Roy Lilley.

If the CQC, the Care Quality Commission, were a boat, it would be a rowing boat, drifting quietly towards the weir while its oarsmen lectured everyone on navigation.

Their latest state of care report, which I linked to this morning, tells us nothing we don't already know.

Services are doing more and people still struggle to get dependable, timely help.