England’s healthcare regulator has issued a public apology over reforms to its monitoring of tens of thousands of hospitals, care homes, dentists and GPs. The apology from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) came in the wake of care organisations complaining of a “hostile” inspection regime and a major new computer system failing to work properly. The government-established watchdog said sorry after the chief executive, Ian Trenholm, abruptly quit at the end of last month midway through reforms that were supposed to improve the assessment of the quality of health and social care providers.
The CQC regulates close to 15,000 care homes, 13,000 homecare agencies, 11,500 dentists, 8,600 GPs and 1,200 hospitals as well as community services and supported living facilities. Care England, which represents private care providers, had complained of “CQC’s over-reliance on outdated data, the lack of transparency in their regulatory approach, and vast inconsistencies between assessments”. “I want to start with an apology,” said Kate Terroni, the interim CQC chief executive, in an email circulated on Monday.
“We’ve got things wrong in the implementation of our new regulatory approach. I know that the changes we’ve delivered so far are not what we promised. It’s made things more difficult than they should be.
” Providers have been experiencing delays to registration and have been unable to upload information to a new online “provider portal” system intended to m.