7. Premises and equipment
Locations where people receive care and treatment as well as the equipment used inside these places must be clean, suitable and looked after properly.
This standard of care is relevant to a host of relevant items, ranging from the physical tools a surgeon uses to gas safety maintenance and decontamination to prevent and control the spread of infections.
8. Complaints
An individual must be able to complain about their care and treatment.
The provider of a person’s care must have a system in place, which allows them to handle and respond to complaints. They must investigate these complaints thoroughly and take action if problems are identified.
An IT system that is specifically designed to handle complaints and other Patient Safety items is Quality Portal. The system can link to your website, allowing you to manage complaints in an organised way, assign complaints to people and more.
9. Good governance
Care providers must have plans that ensure they can meet the 13 fundamental standards. Effective governance and systems must be in place to check on the quality and safety of care. These must help the service improve and reduce any risks to people’s health, safety as well as welfare.
10. Staffing
Care providers must have enough suitably qualified, competent and experienced staff to ensure the provider can meet the fundamental CQC standards.
Closely linked to this standard of care is training and informing care staff. One way in which the NHS does so is via NICE guidance. NICE is short for National Institute for Health & Care Excellence. The guidance as set out offers relevant staff guidelines for individuals who suffer from a specific condition or need. NICE guidance are evidence-based recommendations.
11. Fit and proper staff
Related to the 10th standard of care, fit and proper staff means that care providers must only take on staff that can provide care and treatment as appropriate to their role. Providers must have strong recruitment procedures in place and carry out the relevant checks, e.g. on applicants’ criminal records and work history.
12. Duty of Candour
Duty of Candour is one of the more recent agenda items, as this item entered UK legislation in 2014 following incidents in Stafford that had been kept under the radar.
Duty of Candour means care providers must be open and transparent about the care and treatment they deliver to people. If something goes wrong, providers must tell the person (or their families/carers etc.) what happened, offer support and apologise.
13. Display of ratings
Care providers of individuals are obliged to display their CQC rating in a place where it can easily be seen. They must include the rating on their organisation’s website and provide people with the latest CQC report on their service.
In practice, there are different ways in which organisations do this. UH Bristol as an example has posted it under their ‘Key Publications’ underneath the menu item ‘About us’. Royal Wolverhampton decided on a similar category below their ‘About Us’ and labelled it ‘Our Performance’. In some cases organisations would show their CQC rating at the bottom of their webpage, e.g. Allerton & Westfield Medical Centres.
At the time of writing, these fundamentals have been last updated on the CQC website May 2017. For a full overview and further details on what these standards entail and how and where they apply, we recommend reading the information as presented on that website.