CQC says 500 inspection reports are stuck in IT platform

  • 16 January 2025
CQC says 500 inspection reports are stuck in IT platform
  • The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has around 500 reports which cannot be retrieved from its IT platform
  • The CQC say the time taken to publish some reports "falls far short of what people using services and providers should be able to expect and we have apologised for this and are taking urgent action"
  • The CQC also has a backlog of 5,000 notifications of concern which have not yet been assessed

Leaders of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have admitted that it has around 500 reports which are “stuck” in its IT platform and cannot be retrieved.

Speaking at the Health Select Committee on the work of the CQC on 15 January 2025, Ian Dilks, outgoing chair of the CQC said: “We have reports that go back for some months that are stuck in the system. People can’t get them back out”.

Sir Julian Hartley, chief executive of the CQC said that around 500 reports were involved, adding that the CQC had needed to move new registrations off its platform because it was not working.

Hartley also said that the CQC also has a backlog of 5,000 notifications of concern, including provider notifications of “major issues and changes” as well as notifications of “major issues of concern” from staff and members of the public.

He admitted that some of them “go back months”, with the oldest awaiting assessments with “no review” dating back to 30 November 2023, whilst the oldest cases with “no action” reach back to 19 August 2024.

Hartley stressed that the CQC are now fast-tracking the notifications of concern and will write to the committee to clarify their status.

A spokesperson for the CQC told Digital Health News: “As of December 2024 there were around 500 assessments where a site visit was conducted over 50 days ago and the report had not yet published.

“Our technical team are working with operational teams to progress these reports and we are also looking at system updates which will resolve some of the issues leading to delays in publication.

“The amount of time taken to publish some reports falls far short of what people using services and providers should be able to expect and we have apologised for this and are taking urgent action to ensure we can publish inspection reports much more quickly.

“It is important to note that while the publication of some reports has been delayed, any immediate action that CQC have needed to take to protect people using services has not been affected.”

A review by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) found that ‘significant problems’ with IT systems, most notably the provider portal, contributed to failings at the CQC.

The interim report of the review, led by Dr Penny Dash, chair of the North West London Integrated Care Board, published by DHSC on 26 July 2024, listed IT system problems among the reasons for the CQC’s “significant failings”.

Dr Dash identified a “substantial loss of credibility within the health and social care sectors, a deterioration in the ability of CQC to identify poor performance and support a drive to improved quality – and a direct impact on the capacity and capability of both the social care and the healthcare sectors to deliver much needed improvements in care”.

In her full review into the operational effectiveness of the CQC, published by DHSC on 15 October 2024, she concluded that “poorly performing” systems were hampering CQC’s ability to roll out its single assessment framework, which launched in 2021.

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