Long live the King! This conundrum always used to mark the death of one monarch by celebrating the life of the next, all in one sentence. This week, the old CQC style of monitoring dental practices is no more and the new process has been published.
They have left it to the last moment as, in theory, things are beginning to change from 1st April and the new handbook for dental providers was placed on the CQC website late on Friday. We have been hearing a lot about the new Fundamental Standards, now we know how to provide evidence of compliance.
If we have been conscientious about compliance up to now, then this is not going to be an onerous task, it just means getting our heads focussed on the slightly new direction. All our current Policies and Procedures will still be relevant, but there may be more evidence gathering to do. This is what Quality Compliance Systems will help you with over the next few weeks.
Five basic Fundamental Standards
In case you weren’t already aware, your dental services will be judged against –
- Are they safe?
- Are they effective?
- Are they caring?
- Are they responsive to people’s needs?
- Are they well-led?
Fortunately for us, unlike other sectors that CQC regulates, they will not be giving a rating to primary care dental services in 2015/16, which means we will not be obliged to publish our own ‘marks’ like nursing homes and doctors surgeries.
To make all this standardised, to support the inspection process they will use key lines of enquiry (KLOEs) and we will need to provide examples to demonstrate that no regulations have been breached and therefore that services are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led, based on the regulations. To enable this, the KLOEs map to the regulations to and the fundamental standards. These are available right now in the new Handbook, but QCS will be analyzing these and updating your compliance package to help with the practical side of this.
Human Rights approach
CQC say –
“We have developed a human rights approach to regulation. This looks at a set of human rights principles in relation to the five key questions CQC asks of services. These principles are: fairness, respect, equality, dignity, autonomy, right to life and rights for staff. We have developed definitions of these principles through public consultation and linked these to the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010.”
Look out for more on this in future blogs and QCS updates.
