CQC to change safeguarding reporting ‘with immediate effect’

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is changing “with immediate effect” the way it reports activity on safeguarding, it has been revealed. 

At the regulator’s board meeting yesterday (25 March), chief executive David Behan said the safeguarding record in its customer relationship management (CRM) system was designed before CQC had a ‘timeliness’ KPI, but it is now apparent that using it to capture real-time timeliness of response is causing “significant data quality issues”. 

Under the current CRM system, inspectors can record one or more of several actions: No CQC action required; No action taken; Discussed with the (Local Authority) safeguarding team; Contacted the provider; Noted for the next inspection; Strategy meeting held; Management Review Meeting held; Inspection brought forward; Responsive Inspection; and Enforcement action. 

Behan noted that some of these actions can be completed within 24 or 48 hours. But several cannot be completed in 24 hours, so even if action is underway, the inspector rightly would not tick that the action has been completed. 

“From a KPI perspective, this will be recorded as ‘no action specified’ and could imply that the inspector hasn’t considered the information, when the reality is that the inspector is in the process of taking appropriate action, but the action is not yet complete,” he said. 

“Given the actions that inspections can take in response to safeguarding can in many places rightly take more than 24 hours, the current KPI, and how it is measured, is not appropriate and the KPI will be replaced with immediate effect by new measures.” 

In particular, CQC will change how it reports activity on safeguarding to show National Customer Service Centre (NCSC) performance against its Service Level Agreement (SLA), to show the percentage of safeguarding alerts and concerns that were sent to the inspector within one or two days respectively. 

This will allow the board to hold the executive team to account for ensuring inspectors receive the information as quickly as possible, added Behan. 

Additionally, timeliness of inspector action against all of the possible actions that can be taken and recorded will change. For the April to July 2015 period, inspectors will report to the Board using this new table:

“We will use this three month period to analyse the collected performance data to understand what the appropriate performance expectation should be for timeliness for different types of action, and from July we will report against those agreed performance expectations,” said Behan. 

As well as this immediate work, it was noted that the 2014-15 Complaints, Concerns and Whistleblowing project is leading a piece of work to fundamentally change how CQC receives and processes any piece of information of concern, primarily focusing on the initial triage of information for onward action.

Later this summer, CQC will pilot a new decision-making tool to support triage of all information received by its NCSC, allowing inspectors to respond in different timeframes to different levels of risk that the information presents. 

Behan added that once a new system is tested and ready for delivery, a new KPI would be developed that can show the timeliness of responses and action taken as a result of information of concern, including safeguarding. “This would be available at the earliest for April 2016,” he said. 

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