The Care Quality Commission has redefined the meaning of the word ‘incompetence’

Not only is the UK’s Care Industry a very important age silo market it is something that everybody has a vested interest in working well.

You really have to work very hard to make as many mistakes and create such havoc as the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Year in year out it gets it wrong.

The Health Select Committee has just published a report about its operations for the past year.

Here are a few quotes from the Telegraph coverage of the report.

The CQC is guilty of a “significant distortion” in its priorities as it concentrated on red tape rather than checking that hospitals and care homes were safe.

The situation was made worse by the fact that almost 300 posts were unfilled.

The damning report accuses the CQC of responding “woefully” to a whistleblower who uncovered abuse of people with learning disabilities at a private hospital, and of only offering “out of date and unhelpful” information to the public. 

The list of its faults goes on and on. It would be far better to close the thing down because it gives the public a false sense of security that somebody is monitoring the quality of care when it is plain to see that nobody is.

As I, and many others have said, what is needed is the power of social media to ensure that any faults of care providers reach the attention of media and potential customers in real time rather than fester away in the bottom draw of some absent bureaucrat. Dick Stroud