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 discussions his Department has had with the Care Quality Commission on the findings of its mock inspection of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust’s Slade House site in 2012.

Ben Gummer

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) does not conduct mock-inspections. The CQC compliance report on Slade House, published in 2012, was conducted under its previous inspection methodology. The inspection found that the facility was meeting the essential standards of care it looked at. The Department did not discuss the report’s findings with the CQC.

From 2014, the CQC started introducing a new inspection methodology to mental health services which makes use of a higher-skilled inspection team that includes specialist inspectors, clinical and other experts, and people with experience of care. The findings of these new inspections give patients and the public a more authoritative and comprehensive view of the quality of care provided by health and adult social care providers.