These days, healthcare regulation appears to be all encompassing, touching all aspects of our working lives and the lives and well-being of our patients. However it wasn’t always like this and many may be surprised to learn that that a national policy on the quality assurance of healthcare provision is less than twenty years old.
The White Paper, “The New NHS, modern, dependable” (I have linked the PDF below for all you regulatory geeks) was produced in 1997 in response, in part, to failings in care by the NHS which, sadly, still seem familiar today. The paper identified lapses in quality and instances of variable care, and undertook to devise a new national performance framework to ensure high performance and quality. The result was both the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to provide national guidance in clinical effectiveness and the Commission for Healthcare Improvement (CHI) to support and oversee quality of care at a local level. CHI was established by the Health Act 1999, and in 2003 was subsumed by the Healthcare Commission (HC) as the HC brought under one umbrella CHI, the National Standards Commission (for domiciliary/residential care) and some of the functions of the Audit Commission.
A further reconfiguration of quangos was undertaken in 2004 joined the Mental Health Act Commission (hence the current emphasis on capacity), the Commission for Social Care Inspection and the Healthcare Commission to form the Care Quality Commission (CQC). The Commission was established by the Health and Social Care Act 2008, was created as a shadow organisation on 1st October 2008, and began formal operations on 1st April 2009.
The basis of the CQC’s authority came from the Health and Social Care Act regulations, which were were used to generate the Essential Standards, the method by which the CQC inspected healthcare providers.
Next time, I’ll be discussing some of the challenges faced by the CQC
Take care til then,
Chris
CKS Compliance Consultancy 