Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-25.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what his Department’s target was for the number of qualified mental health trust inspectors in each year since 2010; and how many such inspectors were employed by the Care Quality Commission in each of those years.

Ben Gummer

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England and is responsible for identifying its own staffing requirements and recruiting suitably qualified people. The Department has not set the CQC targets for the recruitment of inspectors. The CQC has provided the following information.

The term ‘qualified mental health inspector’ is not one that is used by the CQC. Part of the person specification used in the recruitment of new inspectors for mental health services is that applicants have a background in mental health, learning disability, or substance misuse.

The CQC is only able to provide figures from April 2014 onwards. Prior to this, the CQC inspectors were not organised into specialist teams and were simply classified as “inspectors”. The CQC planned to recruit 149 inspectors by April 2016.

Number of full time equivalent mental health inspectors employed by the CQC