By John Tingle
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. They have recently published a report of inspections on specialist mental health services. The report is very thorough and detailed and reveals both good and bad practices. When reading the report however the poor practices identified eclipse the good ones.
Patient safety concerns
Concerns about patient safety are a constant and overarching theme in the report. The CQC biggest concern in this care area is patient safety:
“For both NHS and independent mental health services overall, and for eight of the 11 core services, safe was the key question that we most often rated as requires improvement or inadequate. At 31 May 2017, 36% of NHS core services and 34% of independent core services were rated as requires improvement for safe; a further 4% of NHS core services and 5% of independent core services were rated as inadequate for safe “(29).