As practices face up to the enormity of the task of preparing for compulsory Care Quality Commission (CQC) registration, Jeannie Bee, Practice Manager at The Spilsby Surgery in Lincolnshire, examines a new solution that could drastically reduce the time and workload of completing this latest legislative headache…
Staring down the barrel of several months of preparatory work, it is clear that Care Quality Commission (CQC) registration and compliance is going to be an enormous task and is just one of the latest waves of legislation pushing general practice to bursting point.
Practices will need to meet 28 sets of regulatory requirements or ‘Outcomes’. Within each of these Outcomes there are a further 175 compliance assessments or ‘Sub-Outcomes’, for which practices will be required to submit evidence for the Care Quality Commission’s compulsory registration scheme from October. And those with multiple branch surgeries face the prospect of having to submit evidence for each location separately.
Help is at hand, however, in the form of the new CQC Toolkit from iQ Medical, whose various management tools are already used by thousands of practices around the country.
Designed to drastically reduce the amount of work and time required, the iQ CQC Toolkit enables practices to take a logical and structured approach to achieving registration and manage their progress by providing a framework to easily select their current status and assign delegated responsibilities.
It includes over 300 required policies, procedures and protocols that practices need to implement across the 28 Outcomes and 175 sub-outcomes. Guidance and implementation records are included to enable practices to document how they’ve achieved implementation and evidence summaries are included to enable practices to demonstrate their evidence of compliance with each regulatory requirement.
The iQ CQC Toolkit comprises the following key sections which interlink to provide all the policies, procedures, protocols and documents which need to be implemented in order to meet registration and compliance:
Documents Status Summary
This is a management report which automatically compiles and displays the total number of different documents within each outcome and their current ‘Completion’ and ‘Implementation’ status within your practice. (See Diagram 1 below).
[[iQ_1a]]
Individual Outcome Requirements
Each of the 28 main Outcomes breaks down into their constituent Sub-Outcomes. For example, as shown in Diagram 2 (below), Outcome 1 has eleven Sub-Outcomes – 1A to 1K. For each of these there are numerous customisable, pre-completed templates of all the relevant policies, procedures and protocols that need to be implemented. In total, there are over 300 documents.
As well as all the policy documentation, each sub-outcome contains the CQC Regulations, Guidance and Prompts, together with a generic listing of some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence you can consider using when compiling an ‘Evidence Summary’.
Evidence & Compliance Assessment Status Summary
This is a management report which is automatically compiled and displays a composite summary of the status of the Evidence Summary and Compliance Assessment for each of the 175 Sub-Outcomes within the 28 Outcomes.
[[iQ_2a]]
Stress-free ‘Phased’ Implementation
Given the enormity of this task, iQ have responded to the wishes of numerous practice managers and produced a phased approach. The iQ CQC Toolkit framework will therefore be made up of six modules:
- Module 1 will contain the first four core Outcomes (1, 2, 4 & 5 – Outcome 3 is non-core and included in module 5).
The first module will be followed at regular intervals by the five further modules as follows:
- Modules 2–4 will each contain four further core Outcomes (totalling all 16 core Outcomes).
- Modules 5 and 6 will each contain six non-core Outcomes (totalling all 12 non-core Outcomes).
iQ will notify customers when a new module is available to download from the iQ Medical Portal. Each new module will not have any effect on the data you have already completed and you will be able to work on it straightaway.
The iQ CQC Toolkit normally costs £725 + VAT, but with discounts available for groups of practices and current iQ product users this could come down to less than £400 + VAT.
For more information and an online demonstration call iQ on 01937 587798 or visit their website at www.iq-medical.co.uk
Jeannie Bee is Practice Manager at The Spilsby Surgery in Lincolnshire. She has been an NHS manager for 20 years and is currently involved in all aspects of practice management. She is also a board member for her local commissioning consortium and sits on the committee of the Lincolnshire Practice Managers’ Development Group.
