WIREDGOV

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) yesterday published the second report of Professor Glynis Murphy’s independent review of its regulation of Whorlton Hall between 2015 and 2019.

CQC commissioned Professor Murphy to conduct an independent review to look at whether the abuse of patients at Whorlton Hall could have been recognised earlier by the regulatory process and to make recommendations for how CQC can improve its regulation of similar services in the future.

In addition, CQC asked Professor Murphy to conduct a review of international research evidence to look at how abuse is detected within services for adults with a learning disability and autistic people and how such detection can be improved.

The first report of Professor Murphy’s review was published in March 2020 and made a number of recommendations for CQC to strengthen its inspection and regulatory approach for mental health, learning disability and/or autism services. The second report outlines the progress that CQC has made to implement the recommendations. This includes publication of the final report of its review of restraint, seclusion and segregation; work on closed cultures and the development of a tool for rating support plans.

Professor Murphy makes a further five recommendations relating to:

• Services should not be rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ if they have used frequent restraint, seclusion and segregation.
• Services should not be rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ if they cannot show how they support whistleblowing and reporting of concerns.
• Trialling of the Group Home Culture Scale tool, to evaluate whether it helps inspectors determine which settings have closed cultures.
• Trialling of the Quality of Life tool to gauge whether it helps CQC move from evaluating process, towards evaluating more relevant service user outcomes.
• Development of guidelines for when evidence of the quality of care should be gathered from overt or covert surveillance.

Peter Wyman, Chair of CQC, yesterday said:

“Professor Murphy’s second report explores the international research in relation to the detection and prevention of abuse in services and makes additional recommendations for CQC. The report has today been welcomed by CQC’s board who will be considering how best to take forward the recommendations.

“Since March we have been working to incorporate the recommendations made in the first report into our regulation of services for people with a learning disability and autistic people. This includes training our inspectors to better identify services that might be at risk of developing a closed culture, trialling new tools to aid inspectors and improving how we use and analyse data. We know there is more to do and central to this is our ability to hear from people who use services, to give more weight to what they tell us, and then improve our ability to act on their concerns. We will be considering this as part of our new strategy which we will be consulting on next year.

“In addition, we have now published the final report of our review into restraint, seclusion and segregation which calls for fundamental changes to how care is planned, funded, delivered and monitored for people with a learning disability, autistic people and people with mental health conditions. The Out of sight – who cares? report makes a number of recommendations for both CQC and the wider system. We are working with the Government to ensure that these recommendations are implemented and can lead to change.”