Poorly performing IT systems have been undermining operations at the Care Quality Commission (CQC), according to a review of its overall performance.
This has been revealed as one of the key issues in an interim report on the health and social care regulator, led by Dr Penny Dash and published late last week by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
Among the points raised by the review are that there have been “significant challenges” with the provider portal and regulatory platform used by the CQC.
New IT systems have been introduced into the organisation since 2021, with the provider portal coming onstream in July 2023 but not being used to a significant degree until April of this year. The regulatory platform was launched in November 2023 for assessment and included registration and enforcement information by April.
The report says they were implemented with the intention of improving operations with providers, obtaining more insights for regulation, highlighting emerging risks and supporting more risk informed and responsive assessments and inspections.
Significant problems
But the deployments have resulted in significant problems for users, who have struggled to upload documents, to use the systems when the named user is away or off sick, and taken hours to receive a password reset. This has caused a lot of frustration and taken staff away from providing frontline care.
The review concluded that the IT problems are hampering CQC’s ability to roll out its single assessment framework (SAF) and wasting the time of care providers.
Fixing the providing portal and regulatory platform is one of the core recommendations of the report.
Its overall findings have been highly critical of CQC, pointing to a poor operational performance, a loss of credibility in the health and care sectors due to a loss of expertise and restructuring, concerns around the SAF and a lack of clarity on how ratings are calculated and on the outcomes of previous inspections. The other recommendations highlight the need to fix these shortcomings.
Urgent improvement needed
On publishing the findings, DHSC said: “These failings mean the regulator is currently unable to consistently and effectively judge the quality of health and care services, including those in need of urgent improvement.
“The report also found that social care providers are waiting too long for their registration and rating to be updated, with implications for local capacity.”
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “I have been stunned by the extent of the failings of the institution that is supposed to identify and act on failings. It’s clear to me the CQC is not fit for purpose.
“We cannot wait to act on these findings, so I have ordered the publication of this interim report so action can begin immediately to improve regulation and ensure transparency for patients.”
