What do the forthcoming elections mean for CQC?

12 Apr 2017 11:16 AM

With both the local and mayoral elections approaching, you may have heard about public bodies, like CQC, having to respect a ‘pre-election period’, which places certain short-term restrictions on what we’re allowed to publish and announce in the period before an election.

As a non-departmental public body, we also have a duty to be politically impartial – it is important that our conduct during the pre-election period, and at all times, does not call this into question.

We have been informed that the pre-election period will begin on Thursday 13 April 2017 and end on Thursday 4 May 2017 for the local and mayoral elections happening in parts of the country.

While we will not be publishing new national reports during this time, we want to be clear that this will not affect our activities that we class as ‘business as usual’.

As the regulator of health and adult social care, our role is to monitor, inspect, and regulate services to make sure people receive safe, high-quality and compassionate care and to encourage improvement. This will continue.

This means we will be carrying out inspections of health and adult social care services across the country, including planned and follow-up inspections, as well as those that are in response to concerns. Also, we will continue to take enforcement actions against providers that are not delivering the care that we expect from them and that people deserve.

We will continue to publish our findings and judgements of services in our inspections reports, including our ratings of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate so that providers and the public have clear information about the performance of their local services and providers can make the necessary improvements.

For example, while we can’t confirm the exact dates just yet, we expect to publish judgements and reports on the following NHS trusts during or around the local and mayoral pre-election period having already carried out our inspections:

• Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Hounslow and Richmond NHS Community Trust
• King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
• Central & North West London NHS Trust
• Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust
• Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
• Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust
• Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
• Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust
• South West Ambulance Service Trust (111 service)
• Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust

Similarly, we will continue to publish inspection reports and judgements of adult social care and primary medical care services across the country throughout this period.

All of our inspection reports and judgements will be publicised in the normal way, including on our website and to the media, and we will continue to talk about the full range of our work, such as at events and in our blogs.

Further information on what this period means for public bodies is available on the Cabinet Office’s website.