CQC excellence award to be put on hold
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) chair Dame Jo Williams has said that she saw no prospect of the commission’s ‘excellence award’ scheme going ahead after it had received a “universal thumbs down” by provider bodies.
Organisations such as the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services had also not backed the idea of the award during the recent consultation exercise. However, Williams said that the final decision on the award needed to be made by the relevant government minister.
National Care Association chairman Nadra Ahmed OBE said: “I am extremely pleased with the new understanding we now have with the Care Quality Commission and we are determined to build on that for the benefit of the people we care for and our members.”
At the same time the CQC is consulting about changes to fees paid by providers of health and adult social care services for 2012/13. These fees cover CQC’s work in registering and monitoring the providers.
Essentially, the proposal is to extend the scheme to providers of primary care out-of-hours services, to reduce the fees in the middle bandings for providers of dental and independent ambulance services and to reduce the fee in the lowest level banding for providers of adult social care services without accommodation.
CQC’s chief executive Cynthia Bower said: “At this stage we are only proposing some minor changes to the fees scheme. These will be the first steps in a longer term strategy for a scheme that we will develop in close cooperation with providers.”
In March this year the CQC was heavily criticised for implementing a £6m increase in registration fees with just three days’ notice.
At the time Nadra Ahmed said: “I can hardly believe that this announcement has been made today and will be implemented in just three days. How can any care provider properly plan their business strategy when its own regulator fails to give any adequate notice of a rise in regulatory fee levels, which, for some providers, could be thousands of pounds?”
