NHS Confederation responds to CQC State of Care report

Responding to the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC’s) annual assessment of the state of health and social care, Matthew Taylor chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: 

“The safety and quality concerns the CQC has laid bare in its annual report are the other side of the coin of when health and care services are not given the long-term funding and support they need to deliver for their local communities. 

“Health leaders will take comfort in the fact the regulator has acknowledged health and care staff are doing their very best for their patients and that there is a lot of good care across the country. However, they are working under increasingly intolerable conditions, which are leading to record vacancies, standards slipping nationally, and patients not always receiving the care they need.

“The regulator’s birds eye view of health and social care puts it in a unique position to highlight the interdependencies across the different services and how when one part isn’t functioning well due to external pressures, it can lead to access problems and delays, elsewhere. Our members see this daily.

“In particular, health leaders remain very worried about the situation across social care. Only two fifths of patients in hospital are able to leave when they are ready to do so, including due to problems accessing social care, yet the government still has not set out how and when its £500m winter investment will be released to the system. Each day that passes is another where too many medically fit patients are left in hospital beds they shouldn’t be in, which then leads to waits in emergency departments worsening, more ambulances queuing up outside of hospitals, elective procedures having to be cancelled, and primary care getting more overwhelmed by people’s health deteriorating in the community.

“The 42 integrated care systems have the potential to drive forward improvements alongside providers but they are being collectively held back by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the scale of the workforce and funding challenges and to provide adequate support.

“With the government rowing back on its commitments to reforming social care by delaying the cap on costs and with warnings of already-stretched and under-resourced public services having to make even more cuts, health leaders want to remain optimistic, but without further action, their hopes are dwindling.”