Care Quality Commission – State of Care Report published
The report has found that, while the majority of services across health and social care have been rated as good. There is significant variation in quality of services – Two thirds of hospitals are in need of improvement, with 13% of hospitals inadequate for safety and 10% of social care providers inadequate for safety. Factors behind this include staffing issues and failure to learn from incidents and errors so they don’t happen again.
Healthwatch England’s response:
Responding to the CQC’s State of Care 2014/2015 Katherine Rake, Chief Executive of Healthwatch England, said:
“Today’s report from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) highlights that many people receive good quality health and social care, but there is still unacceptable variation in the quality of services. It is striking that good services operate by listening to people’s experiences, responding to complaints and learning from previous mistakes, whereas less effective services often fail to do so. We would now like to see all services operate with the right culture of openness and transparency when things go wrong. We know that three in five people who complain feel their concerns are not properly addressed.
Today’s report underlines how important it is for services to welcome and recognise the importance and value of feedback and complaints, so that patient safety and experience are not compromised in the future. We want to see hospitals, GP surgeries and care homes learning from mistakes and showing people that they are listening to them in order to make positive changes to services. No matter where someone lives or what service they have used, people’s concerns should be properly taken on board and services improved as a result.”
