Agenda item

(To receive a report from Cat Eglinton, Inspection Manager- Care Quality Commission (CQC),which provides the Committee with an overview of the role of the Care Quality Commission throughout the pandemic and the future direction of the CQC)

Consideration was given to a report by the Inspection Manager – Care Quality Commission, which provided an update on the work of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in conjunction with Lincolnshire County Council.

The Committee was informed that the CQC was the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England whose purpose was to ensure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care, using the monitoring of services to inform its inspection schedule.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the CQC had adapted how they regulated their work within the health and social care system. Although routine inspection was paused temporarily, regulating continued through enhanced monitoring of services.

Driven by the need to adapt to the pandemic, the CQC had implemented new ways of working and had made progress in how services were monitored. The CQC would continue to monitor services using a risk based approach by using risk based decisions to inform inspection activity. Inspections would be carried out to services classified as having a significant risk and enforcement action would be taken where necessary to ensure that services were working at a safe and adequate standard.

Members considered the report, and during the discussion the following points were noted:

• Inspection teams were subject to their own internal monitoring which would include assessing the effectiveness of a risk based approach. Monitoring was undertaken using a range of methods including sampling, external quality measures, fluidity processes and formal evaluation.
• The CQC acknowledged that there were significant issues with staffing and within the social care sector. Inspectors would use their judgement when assessing high risk services to ensure that they were being fair to services with staffing issues that were unavoidable. Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) had implemented a workforce strategy in which they worked alongside the relevant partners to evaluate the most effective and creative ways to ease staffing issues.
• The CQC had a national team which received intelligence on unregistered care providers and took steps to proactively remove them from the market.
• As a regulator, the CQC did not have a quality assurance function and would not provide direct advice on matters. However when it was deemed appropriate, the CQC would signpost providers to local services.
• The role of LCC was to ensure that services were compliant with requirements and provide quality assurance, working with providers where change and support was required.
• Solutions to issues within the care sector often relied on a collective approach from a number of partners to find appropriate solutions.
• Of the nine care providers within Lincolnshire that had received an 'inadequate' rating from the CQC, three had been closed but had not yet been de-registered; one had been inspected and had indicated a level of improvement; and five were still deemed high risk, with enforcement work on-going and additional conditions required of their registration. If at any point the CQC were concerned about a service which was being monitored they would visit the service for an inspection and take action where necessary.
• LCC also provided weekly monitoring and monthly inspections to providers who were deemed high risk.
• There was a growing number of care provisions within Lincolnshire that had been rated 'outstanding' by CQC, around 2% more than the national average.
• The Executive Councillor for Adult Care and Community Wellbeing emphasised the importance of ensuring that carers felt valued and were recognised for their important role within the County. The Council would be working with carers to ensure that their hard work was acknowledged.
• The Committee suggested that low wages and  long working hours were contributing to issues with staff recruitment and retention in the adult social care sector and that many staff were not adequately rewarded for their hard work. However, it was acknowledged that LCC were a living wage employer and the Council had no control over the rates paid by private healthcare providers.
• The Committee was hugely reassured by the report and the work of the CQC in conjunction with the Council.
• It was suggested that more could be done to encourage young people to consider caring as a career.
• The Committee welcomed a further report from the CQC in 2022 following the publication of the CQC annual report.

RESOLVED:

              That the report be noted and a further report be received in one year.