Safety recommendation
HSIB recommends that the Care Quality Commission evaluates the way in which it reviews how community mental health services assess risk of harm, to ensure its inspections are in line with the latest national guidance.
Response:
Care Quality Commission is the health and social care regulator in England and exercises powers under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to monitor, inspect and report on the quality of health and social care services. We make sure services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage services to improve. We are developing a Single Assessment Framework to regulate providers, local authorities and systems that will help us provide an up-to-date view of quality.
We welcome the recommendation from HSIB to evaluate the way in which we review how community mental health services assess risk of harm.
We regularly review national guidance, to inform the guidance and tools we provide inspectors to assess safety within services and compliance by providers with our regulations, such as regulation 9 around person-centred care and risk assessment.
In response to the HSIB recommendations we established a working group across policy and regulatory leadership to review the recommendations and develop an action plan for agreement by the Director of Mental Health. The working group identified several actions, which we are starting to implement:
- Develop a learning set for inspectors to increase awareness of NICE guidance 225, on assessing the risk of harm and carry out reflective practice sessions about how NICE guidelines inform our approach to inspection.
- Update our Evidence Table 6: Review of Care Records tool, used on site by inspectors to assess the standards of risk assessing, to include reference to NICE guidance 225. We will review the need to update this tool as part of the wider work to support the new single assessment framework.
- Engage with community mental health service providers to establish how they are delivering services in line with the NICE guideline 225, on assessing the risk of harm.
Actions planned to deliver safety recommendation:
- Develop a learning set for our inspectors and assessors to increase their awareness of NICE guideline 225, on assessing the risk of harm and carry out reflective practice sessions about how we use NICE guidelines to inform our approach to inspecting services, by September 2023.
- Review and update our Evidence Table 6: Review of Care Records tool, used on site by inspectors to assess the standards of risk assessing, to include reference to NICE guidance 225. Review as part of the work programme to support the Single Assessment Framework, by September 2023.
- Engage with community mental health service providers to establish how they are delivering these services in line with the national guidance of the assessment of risk of harm in line with the NICE guideline 225, by September 2023."
Response received on 15 June 2023.