The good-old HSJ tells us a report to the CQC board, written by the chief executive, someone called Ian Trenholm, said;
“As the pressures on health and social care systems begin to ease, it is incumbent upon us to consider our role in supporting providers in developing recovery plans, taking into account the needs of teams in recovering from the pandemic, and patients waiting for treatment. It is essential that any recovery plan includes both factors.”
Aside from a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, that recovery plans need to think about patients on the waiting lists and the staff are knackered, it's difficult to see this vacuous logorrhoea as little more than another example of the total uselessness of inspection, as a concept or a way of improving any aspect of quality.
The historic, heroic, colossal, soaring response to the challenges of a pandemic, no one was prepared for, will secure the NHS’ place in history as noble and humble, compassionate, innovative and with the courage of a lion.
Its achievements are admired globally. Other health systems have collapsed, been found wanting, poorly structured and fragile.
Where was the CQC in all this? Dunno... but it now looks like they want to take credit for the recovery.
Where all the NHS achievements, it’s flexibility, nimbleness and smarts, buttressed, supported, encouraged or assisted by the knowledge that the CQC, with its flat caps and clip boards were working from home?
If our most important public service can excel and shine as a beacon of global excellence during a world health-care crisis, what can bureaucrats with bother on their mind and Biros in their pockets, possibly claim to add?
There is nothing I can think of that the CQC can bring to a post-Covid NHS, other than irritating everyone and wasting their time.
I can’t think of a single thing that anyone, serious about managing a chip-shop, never mind a hospital, could imagine that inspection brings to modern management... neither a jot nor a tittle.
Even before Covid, turning up and inspecting was generally agreed to be futile.
Turn up and it’s good, you wasted your time.
Turn up and it’s bad, it’s too late.
Everyone knows, page one, chapter one, paragraph one of the dummies guide for managers, says… don’t waste time on inspection.
Dare I quote… again… the grandfather of management gurus, Edwards Demming;
‘Quality cannot be inspected into a product or service; it must be built into it.’
The fact that there are hospitals that struggle is a signal, beyond the wit of the CQC to grasp.
Hospitals are in trouble, almost always because they are prisoners of their geography, their economy and their history. It has little to do with the way they are run.
Too few staff is a feature of national workforce planning and the way staff are recruited, trained and paid… outside the bailiwick of the employers and nothing to do with the way in which an organisation is run.
Caring for more people than the budget allows is called overtrading and Trusts have little option other than to run-up waiting lists or close services. Neither of which they are permitted to do. So, they bust the budget which does not mean they cannot manage their finances.
Too many hospitals in one area and not enough in others is an historical consequence of resource allocation by lobbying and not by isochrone. Boards can only manage the hand they are dealt.
There is no evidence, from anywhere in the world, that inspection improves anything.
Ministers are stuck with the CQC because, when it was invented, by Labour’s health minister, Alan Milburn, inspecting was all he understood.
We are smarter now and know different.
Inspecting hospitals is a fraud on the public, who are obliged, whatever the denouncement of the clip-board brigade, to use the facility, good-bad-or-indifferent.
I makes no difference to them. Irrelevant to families, of no consequence to the public and pointless to the local people who rely on the hospital for the local economy and jobs.
Everyone tells me, Covid is a chance of a new beginning. Let’s seize it.
The data exists, the software exists, the dashboards exist, to measure performance in real-time, spot disasters in the making, head-off problems with help not hindrance, spot what is really working… and share it.
Something really useful for NHSX to get stuck into. They should have a solution inside 30 days...
No one interested in quality and I include No18, can seriously carry on with the charade and cost of the CQC.
Inspection is demoralising, time wasting, irrelevant, expensive, slow, out-of-sync, subjective, can't be measured, a diversion and utterly pointless.
>> I'm hearing - GPs have been urged to offer COVID-19 jabs again to patients who have previously refused, after a study suggested vaccine hesitancy has declined sharply since December.
>> I'm hearing- Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells Trust’s modelling suggests covid patients would occupy 50 to 100 beds in mid June in a “reasonably optimistic” scenario.
>> I'm hearing - The chief executive of US healthcare organisation is to be NHSE’s new director of transformation. Timothy Ferris, is currently an NHSI NED, is moving to a full time executive role. He is presently chief executive of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organisation, a not for profit healthcare group.
Formerly a primary care physician. Ferris will lead NHSE’s new transformation directorate, which is intended to bring together its operational improvement team and NHSX. Aiming to maintain and improve the rapid service innovations seen during the covid-19 pandemic. That's the death-knell... make innovation someone's job and it becomes nobody's job. Bad move, IMHO.
