Councils in England will share £4m to help them prepare for assessments of their adult social services by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The Department of Health and Social Care is giving each of the 153 authorities a £26,730 one-off payment to help familiarise themselves with the process and effectively engage with their first assessment.
The regulator is currently testing its approach to assessing adults’ services with five authorities: Birmingham, Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Nottingham and Suffolk.
This has involved requesting information on how they are carrying out their adult social care functions and then carrying out on-site visits. The CQC has also tested how it gathers feedback from providers, people receiving services and other stakeholders, and how it involves experts by experience in its assessments.
Each of the pilot councils will receive a report of its assessment, an indicative score, of 1-4, for each of nine quality statements and an indicative overall rating (‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’), all of which will be published.
It will start its formal assessments of local authorities later this year and is currently working out which councils it will evaluate first.
The CQC expects to take two years to assess all of the 153 councils, each of which will receive an overall, single-word rating, as well as scores against the quality statements.
More on CQC assessments
Community Care Inform Adults users can find out more about CQC adults’ services assessments in this episode of our Learn on the Go podcast, featuring the regulator’s director of adult social care, Mary Cridge, and Amanda Stride, deputy director for delivery of local authority assessments.
You will discover what how frontline practitioners will be involved in the process, how local circumstances will be taken into account and what expertise CQC staff will bring to assessments.
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Do I assume from this that the Department of Health and Social Care feels Local Authorities, (LAs) are unprepared for these CQC audits and if they are whose fault is it.
It could be some of the LAs will be, but mainly it is the government who have done this and previous Tory governments since 2010 through their austerity cuts and not just to Adult Social Care, but the equivalent with children and virtually every section of Local Government. Is this the government who is feeling guilty about this, which I doubt for governments never feel guilty when they mainly are forever and a day.
Surely assessments should see it as it is and not after means to put right, for then lessons will never be learned, but that is another issue for they are hardly, if ever in any organisation in which customers and patients have found to their cost and in many instances their lives.
The blame to a large extent is not LAs, but purely government, but governments will do as they wish to for this they have done since the start of life.
To put what is wrong £26,730 is nowhere near enough and certainly not as a one-off payment and even with yearly payments.
Governments need to learn also but they are much worse with this than LAs and all other authorities, for governments never learn, just make the situations much worse.