Barchester Healthcare’s independent hospitals in England are formally responsible to two regulatory bodies. The Care Quality Commission (often referred to as CQC) carries out regular inspections of all hospitals and from the beginning of this year rates them as either ‘inadequate’, ‘requires improvement’, ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. Copies of CQC reports can be requested from our hospitals or found on our website for each individual hospital, although please note that most of our hospitals have not yet been rated under the new system. They can also be found at the Care Quality Commission’s website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/, which also sets out the role of the Commission in detail.
MONITOR
Our hospitals are also regulated by Monitor, who are sponsored by the Department of Health to ensure that services work for patients’ benefit. Our hospitals must be registered with Monitor, who are responsible for financial oversight of our hospitals, working in partnership with the Care Quality Commission. Details of Monitor’s role can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/monitor
Monitor Licence Agreement
COMMISSIONERS
In addition to formal regulation from these two bodies we are visited and inspected regularly by our commissioners. We can also be visited at any time by Healthwatch, the consumer champion for health and social care, who operate on both a national and a local level. Local branches of Healthwatch can be located on the Healthwatch UK website: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/monitor , which also provides useful information and recent news on health issues.
INTERNAL REGULATION
In addition to these external agencies Barchester Healthcare has a number of internal quality checks, including the work of our Regulation Team, who carry out frequent inspection visits, Quality First audit visits by our management team and a number of other internal audits processes, including our regular Clinical Governance panels, overseen by our Senior Management Group and our board, with both executive and non-executive members.
We also produce an annual Quality Account that commits us to improving our service through working co-operatively with patients and other stakeholders, such as relatives and regular professional visitors, on goals set by stakeholders. A copy of our current Quality Account is available here.
We would always encourage patients, relatives, commissioners and other health professionals to read the inspection reports on our hospitals and our quality account.
