In March we announced that Kate Terroni would be taking on the interim position of Deputy Chief Executive and stepping away from her role as Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care. We are now delighted to announce that James Bullion will be joining CQC as the new interim Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Integrated Care. James will be leaving his current role as Director of Adult Social Services (DASS) in Norfolk to join CQC in the coming months. James said, "I am delighted to be joining CQC to take up the Chief Inspector role. It's such an important time for CQC, councils, and people drawing on services as we strengthen the national assurance arrangements, and reform social care. I am grateful to Norfolk for supporting this, and hope to bring my experience and understanding of being a DASS as well as my national work as ADASS past president, and on social care discharge to the many talents in CQC." Welcoming him, Kate Terroni, said, "Itâs fantastic to have James join the team at the point we go live with our new powers on assurance, as an experienced DASS and having been involved with the development of our approach". Weâve updated our guidance on making notifications to us under IR(ME)R. The changes reflect the amended criteria for making a statutory notification when there has been an accidental or unintended exposure to ionising radiation in healthcare settings. These include changes to some dose thresholds and a new category of administering the wrong radiopharmaceutical. Weâre developing a short data collection for the oral health sector. This should: support our monitoring and inspection planning reduce pre-inspection burden on you enable us to be more targeted in our inspection activity highlight the challenges you face to inform our publications. Weâll be undertaking a small pilot of the draft questions in June 2023 across a sample of 200 registered dental locations. Locations across England will be chosen at random. It will be open for 4 weeks and is voluntary to complete. No provider registered within the last 12 months will be included in the pilot. This pilot will help us to improve our questions and internal processes to ensure the collection is as seamless a possible. Weâll keep you updated through your trade associations and regular updates in this bulletin. We recently wrote to integrated care system (ICS) leaders to update that we will be starting a national assessment of the equity in access quality statement. This will take place between April and July 2023. This quality statement is part of our single assessment framework within the 'quality and safety' theme. The national assessment will provide an over view of how ICSs are working to support people to access the care, support and treatment they need, when they need it. It will also report on how ICSs are responding to inequalities of access across their populations. We will review publicly available data and information - there is no requirement for ICSs to provide information to us. However, we are offering the opportunity for key members of ICSs to take part in virtual focus groups. Participation is voluntary and findings will contribute to the national assessment. Because We All Careâ¯is our joint public behaviour change campaign to encourage more people to share care experiences with CQC and Healthwatch England. To date it has driven over 90,000 people to share their, or a loved ones, experiences.  Weâve launched a new phase of our campaign, which focuses on understanding the experiences of people with a learning disability and autistic people.â¯People with a learning disability and autistic people are more likely to experience poorer care and face inequalities, despite needing to use health and social care services regularly. Their needs are not always met by the system, leaving people and their loved ones feeling diminished or ignored. You can hear real life experiences from our 7 ambassadors.  Help raise awareness by using our stakeholder toolkit and sharing the hashtag #BecauseWeAllCare on Twitter.  We regularly consult on a range of projects, and you can have your say via CitizenLab â our participation platform. Sign up today and you can share your ideas and comment on live projects. Weâre currently looking for feedback on: How primary care providers can better accommodate the needs of autistic people using services. How we gather feedback from staff across health and social care who may be more likely to face inequalities in the workplace. The way we plan to present reports and ratings on our website. How oral health in care homes can be improved. Our dental mythbusters aim to clear up some common myths about of inspections of dental services and share agreed guidance to best practice. Our latest dental mythbuster is looks at caring for people with dementia in a dental practice. We've made some changes to our Executive Team. Read more on our website. Skills for Care and Supported Loving have published training materials around supporting people who need care and support to have meaningful and safe personal relationships. Read more and access the training materials. |