The Care Quality Commission was due to publish its annual performance assessment (APA) of council adult social care departments on Wednesday.
That was until it got locked into a row in recent days about the quality and validity of its assessments of NHS hospital trusts.
The APA has now been delayed until a date which will be specified shortly.
To recap, Basildon and Thurrock NHS Trust was ordered to make improvements last week after the CQC and foundation trust regulator Monitor identified a string of failings in care.
This was on the back of a CQC inspection carried out in October, the same month in which it issued its annual health check, which rated the trust as 'good' on quality of care. Though this was based on performance between April 2008 and March 2009, the apparent discrepancy prompted questions in the press about CQC's ratings system.
This only intensified yesterday when Dr Foster Intelligence published its hospital safety guide which found that 12 trusts were significantly underperforming in this area - including eight rated as good or excellent for care by the CQC in the 2008-9 health check. Dr Foster Intelligence is - interestingly enough - a public-private partnership involving Department of Health agency the NHS Information Centre.
The resulting media storm has forced the CQC to put back the annual performance assessment.
So what you might ask - it will be out soon enough. Here are a few issues:-
- Delaying publication until next week would mean it would coincide with the publication of the first comprehensive area assessment - the new system for assessing councils and their partners, potentially taking the focus off the social care APA.
- Councils have long had their results and are sitting on them rather than sharing their success (or otherwise) with their local populations.
- The delay will be grist to the mill for all those who said that an organisation with a remit covering health and adult social care would inevitably - when push came to shove - have to prioritise the former because of its greater media value and firmer grip on the national psyche.
I'm not blaming the CQC - the organisation has got a lot on its plate at the moment, both organisationally and in public relations terms - but it is not a good sign when one of the centrepieces of the social care calendar is delayed due to a row over health.
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