Continuing our journey to improve and return to good regulation
CQC’s Chief executive, Sir Julian Hartley talks about the importance of purpose in our work and steps we’re taking to improve how we work.
Over the last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance for any organisation of having a clear purpose, and that purpose driving everything it does. When they get this right, organisations are clear on what they need to achieve, how they’ll go about their work, and what values guide the way they behave.
A focus on purpose, when done well, can galvanise an organisation and its stakeholders around a shared mission. For us at CQC, that mission is fundamentally about delivering registration, inspection and assessment activity across health and social care so that providers, the public and other stakeholders have an up-to-date view of quality, care is safer for people, and providers are supported to improve.
We’re not currently doing that.
Purpose, goals, values and behaviour
When I joined CQC one of the first things I heard from my new colleagues, the providers we regulate and the public we serve is that we needed to refocus on our purpose to get back to delivering our mission.
In my last blog I talked about how we are going about this work, and how we were taking it forward in partnership by co-creating the CQC Way.
We’ve just finished the latest phase of engagement to support this work, where we asked for feedback on a set of proposals that covered:
- Our purpose and vision
- What we should be aiming to achieve — our short and long-term goals
- How you want us to behave
- The principles that guide our regulation
Thousands of colleagues in CQC, people who work in health and social care, members of the public and other stakeholders have shared their thoughts on these proposals over the last few weeks.
Thank you to everyone who has been involved. Your honesty, openness and willingness to work with us is vital to helping us get back on track.
You can read all the comments that people have shared on our online platform. There’s so much on there that is important for us to consider, but there are two comments that particularly resonated with me:
“I hope to prioritise the core function of inspecting and regulating services, with simplified assessment frameworks, better tools, and more on-site assessments. I hope for clear, accessible reports promptly and swift action on issues when needed.”
“Respect — we need to treat other people with respect. There is nothing more challenging than working with people who have no respect for their partners. And yes…we are partners. We might not be the best partners, but we are still partners in this mission.”
I couldn’t agree more with both of these. We must focus on delivery to achieve our purpose, and we must do this in partnership — with the people we regulate, the public we serve and the wider system.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll analyse all the feedback we’ve received to develop a charter that describes how CQC will work to deliver its purpose and what you should expect as a colleague, provider, stakeholder, or member of the public. We’ll continue to engage and work collaboratively to test and develop the charter.
Improving in partnership
Working collaboratively with the organisations we regulate has to be at the heart of how we improve as a regulator.
We need to understand their experience of regulation and they need to have a good understanding of how we’ll regulate them.
As part of this, we’ll be delivering a series of provider roadshow events across the country from April to July. There will be in-person events in Manchester, London, Leicester and Bristol where we’ll update on the CQC Way, work with us to develop how we regulate, learn about our new provider handbook and how we’re continuing to improve
I’m really looking forward to being at some of these events and working with providers to shape what the future of our regulation looks like.
Recognising what’s gone wrong
Many of you will know about the significant issues caused by the technology aspect of our transformation. For our colleagues, this has made it more difficult to do their jobs, and some providers have had a difficult experience of the provider portal and factual accuracy checking process.
We urgently needed to establish why these problems happened and what could be done to resolve them. To help with this, I commissioned an independent review of our new technology. We’ve now published the report from this review on our website.
This sets out a picture of how things went wrong and makes recommendations for how we can improve our technology. We’ll be working over the next few weeks to agree what the next steps should be.
But whatever we decide, it’s vital that any work we do on technology or digital systems involves the people that use them. That means we’ll be involving our colleagues, providers and others in re-designing and re-building the systems that need to change.
Again, working in partnership is key to us improving as a regulator.
Strengthening our leadership
Having the right leadership in place is also key to our improvement. I’m really pleased that, as part of our move to have 4 permanent chief inspectors, we’ve recently appointed Dr Arun Chopra to be our first ever Chief Inspector of Mental Health, and Professor Aidan Fowler as interim Chief Inspector of Healthcare.
It’s also fantastic news that Professor Sir Mike Richards has been confirmed as the new Chair of CQC. Mike brings a wealth of experience across health and social care and, of course, in building a successful regulatory approach. I’m really looking forward to working with Mike on our improvement journey.
There’s still more for us to do to improve, and we’ll carry on working in partnership with our colleagues, the public and providers to take the actions we need to deliver regulation that people deserve.
