Luciana Berger – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2015-10-13.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many mental health providers have been inspected by the Care Quality Commission in each of the last five years; and what the longest period of time is that a mental health provider has been without inspection since 2010.
Ben Gummer
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care providers in England. The CQC is responsible for assessing whether providers are meeting the fundamental standards. The CQC provided the following information:
Since the introduction of the CQC’s new inspection regime in September 2013 the CQC has conducted 34 ratings inspections across NHS mental health providers (these providers have 639 separate locations). This is around two thirds of all NHS providers with a primary inspection category of mental health registered with CQC. The CQC has also conducted 99 inspections across independent mental health locations, including substance misuse services.
The CQC is unable to provide a detailed breakdown of data prior to September 2013 when the new style of inspection was introduced due to the disproportionate cost of compiling this data.
There are a number of mental health locations that have not been inspected since 2010. When inspecting NHS mental health providers CQC does not necessarily inspect every single location.
The focus of all CQC inspections is on the quality and safety of services, based on the things that matter to people. We always ask the following five key questions of services: Are they safe? Are they effective? Are they caring? Are they responsive to people’s needs? Are they well-led?
The CQC expects to complete its inspections of mental health providers by the end of June 2016, with the exception of intendent standalone substance misuse services, which are on a longer timetable as we have just begun to roll out our new approach to these services.
