The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is launching a pilot to assess the quality of care across a whole local area, and test out how well coordinated health and care services are in local areas, they announced today.
There will not be any additional inspections for GPs, the CQC said, but the data from GPs and hospitals will be analysed to add a further level of information.
Ministers are currently reviewing a CQC request to ask for information from local authorities and clinical commissioning groups in order to assess the local coordination.
The CQC has selected Greater Manchester as a pilot area so this work can contribute to better co-ordination of health and care services for ‘Devo Manc’. North Lincolnshire was also selected as it had the highest proportion of ratings outside of the North West and because the area does not include a big city.
CQC will issue and consult on report findings for each local area in early 2016.
The project aims to assess whether bringing together knowledge about the quality of care of a whole place can help to encourage providers of health and social care to make improvements locally.
CQC’s chief inspector of general practice and integrated care, Professor Steve Field, said: “Our new ‘Quality of care in a Place’ pilot is really about increasing that level of openness even further by building a picture of what the whole quality of care is like for people living in a particular area – including how well services are co-ordinated.”
The pilot will also specifically look at the experiences of the elderly and people needing mental health care to see whether analysis of different population groups is helpful in building a picture of the system as a whole.
