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MEDIASAVVY
WHO’S BEEN SAYING WHAT..?
July 2014 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 17
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Services |
Regulation
NEW METHODOLOGY
There is no doubt that the new methodology will focus on the ‘five questions’,
which are: Is the service safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led?
You may have seen the provider handbooks and appendices on the CQC
website, which set out the proposed framework. There are some key features
which mark a change from the previous approach:
•
The ‘provider information return’ will be sent out to services before the
inspection, so that they can self-assess against the five questions.
•
There will be ‘key lines of enquiry’, which will act as prompts to inspectors as
they look at how the five questions are worked out in the service.
•
There will be ‘ratings’ which will be published and will determine inspection
frequency. These ratings extend from ‘outstanding’ to ‘good’, then ‘requires
improvement’ and finally ‘inadequate’. There are complicated rules which
determine how these rating are arrived at – however there are also helpful
guidelines that tell you what each rating might look like for each question.
•
There will be a greater reliance on ‘experts by experience’ to provide the
service user perspective.
•
There will be an emphasis on ‘intelligence monitoring’, which means
gathering information from a range of stakeholders.
•
Finally, although the Care Act 2014 has been granted Royal Assent, the new
draft ‘fundamental standards of care’ and ‘regulated activity regulations’ are
now awaiting parliamentary approval so cannot be enforced until that is
achieved. It is expected that this will happen by October 2014 so that the
new approach is fully grounded in law.
Meanwhile, between now and October 2014 CQC will continue to undertake
routine inspections, so if you have an unannounced inspection this will be
according to the existing methodology. There will be one difference and that is
that the summary at the beginning of the report will focus on the ‘five
questions’ as a taster of what is to come. The possible reasons for an
inspection before October are: that your last inspection occurred between April
and October 2013; there are outstanding compliance actions; there have been
complaints made to CQC which they may be following up in terms of
compliance; or you have changed registered manager in the last 12 months.
When looking forward to the new approach, some of the most recently
published inspection reports give clues as to what may be asked. However it is
worth waiting to see exactly what is proposed for the substance misuse sector
and, where possible, contribute to the debate through routes such as FDAP and
your representatives on the ‘expert group’.
As CQC publish more information, such as the ‘signposting’ document with
an outline of their new approach, it will be possible to look at the implications
for your service more fully. To help this process there will be courses which will
focus on the substance misuse sector this autumn, organised through DDN.
David Finney is an independent social care consultant. His course on
everything you need to know about the new structure is on 11 September in
central London – details at www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘...now there is someone
dedicated to this sector, who
can join up all the dots within
CQC and be a point of reference
for external agencies.’
I’m wholly on the side of senior nurses who, at their annual
conference in Liverpool, called for those with drink-related
injuries to be turned away from A&E and directed instead to
‘drunk tanks’… It’s not just that these idiotic individuals cost
money we can ill afford (£3.5bn a year is spent on treating
patients for the effects of alcohol; at weekends, up to 70 per
cent of A&E admissions are alcohol-related); it’s also that
patching up these fools diverts precious resources from other
areas of the NHS. Areas such as care for the elderly, that are
manifestly more deserving than some silly girl who’s drunk her
own weight in Bacardi Breezers and who is slumped
unconscious in a pool of her own bodily fluids.
Sarah Vine,
Mail
, 18 June
The next time you hear someone complaining about the ‘nanny
state’ or the right of individuals to drink as they see fit, spare a
thought for the people around the drinker. In particular,
consider whether our children and young people have the right
to grow up in an environment that protects them from the harm
that alcohol causes.
Dr Evelyn Gillan,
Scotsman
, 5 June
The elephant in the room is the truth that it’s pleasure that
drives drug use – guidelines that fail to acknowledge this will
mean people will not pay attention to them.
AdamWinstock,
Observer
, 22 June
E-cigarettes are either going to save millions of lives by helping
people to quit smoking or they are going to destroy millions of
lives by luring children and young people into the habit. It is
very hard for the onlooker to know what to believe, when the
rhetoric is flying in both directions from very eminent people
who all have a passionate commitment to public health.
Sarah Boseley,
Guardian
, 16 June
The wildly contradictory reports on the health effects of the e-
cigarette mean the only certainty I have about them is that no
one knows what sucking in clouds of liquid nicotine really does
to the human body… it’s not all that long ago that cigarettes
were warmly welcomed into society – and millions suffered and
still suffer the cancers to show for it. Well before e-cigs become
just as entrenched, we need more research to discover how
they work.
Lucy Tobin,
London Evening Standard
, 13 June
Sending drug users to jail is usually an expensive waste of time.
But decriminalisation’s flaw is that it does nothing to
undermine the criminal monopoly on the multi-billion-dollar
drugs industry. The decriminalised cocaine consumed without
criminal consequences in Portugal is still supplied by the gangs
who cut off heads in Colombia. Only legalisation takes the
business out of the hands of the mafia.
Economist
, 18 June
Tony Blair was absolutely right to make the link between opium
production in southern Afghanistan and heroin use in Britain.
But it is clear now that he and others were wrong to think this
link could be broken through military action internationally
and police enforcement domestically.
William Patey,
Guardian
, 25 June