Patients called to help ‘small army’ of hospital inspectors
The new chief inspector of hospitals wants hundreds of NHS patients to join inspection teams of doctors and nurses to radically change the way hospitals in England are assessed.
Professor Sir Mike Richards said he wanted to recruit a “small army” of inspectors to build review teams which will have the power to give all hospitals in England school-style ratings.
Each of the 161 acute hospital trusts will be rated as “outstanding”, “good”, “requires improvement” or “inadequate”, he said.
If they are deemed to be inadequate they could be put into “special measures”.
Eleven hospital trusts were put into this category earlier this week following a review of 14 trusts where there were concerns about mortality rates, and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced that he would be sending hit squads of experts into the trusts to improve patient care.
Setting out his plans after taking the job, Sir Mike pledged the review teams will be “robust, fair and transparent”.
He called for patients, carers and clinicians to come forward to help the health care regulator the Care Quality Commission (CQC) with the inspection process.
Today I am issuing a call for inspectors. I want assistance in this inspection process – Sir Mike Richards
Sir Mike said: “We will have relatively large multi-professional teams of experts – those will include doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, managers, but importantly they will also include patients and carers who we consider to be experts by experience.
“Today I am issuing a call for inspectors. I want assistance in this inspection process.
“I want to start building a small army of inspectors. These inspectors need to come from different walks of life, some of them will be practising clinicians who will come and do two or three inspections a year, some others will be retired clinicians but importantly we are also seeking patients and carers and we will provide training.
“We will assess whether services are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led.”
CQC ‘flawed’
But he also admitted that the embattled regulator had “flawed” inspections in the past.
On Tuesday, Mr Hunt said that it was “worrying” that the CQC failed to spot any real cause for concern at the 11 trusts which were put into special measures by rating them as ‘compliant’ with basic standards.
“If we thought that the CQC process in the past had been perfect we wouldn’t be changing it,” Sir Mike said.
“We are changing it because we recognise that it was flawed.”