Tina,
Thank you for this initiative – I’m sure everyone here appreciates your efforts to raise the standards of Adult Social Care.
Going back to the reply you received from Andrew Lansley’s correspondence department: it resembles each and every reply I’ve ever read from any of these ‘bodies’, because they have a unit that writes letters divorced from the coalface. I could almost guess the name of the signature on the bottom!
If you’ve got the energy to do so, you could challenge this one line alone :
"Unlike its predecessors, the CQC does not have responsibility for individual complaints and will not usually intervene in individual incident." The CQC’s predecessor, CSCI, never had any responsibility for individual complaints and was never required to intervene in any individual incident.
If you would like me to dig out the CSCI letter that quoted that reference to me, I’m happy to do so (might take me a weekend to find it!!). And I could also put you in touch with a Legal Researcher who has been asking questions as to that one too.
“...and will add them to the intelligence it gathers about providers on its quality and risk profiles, which can act as a prompt for regulatory action ...” There are a few people who have FOI requests in, asking for information about the ‘number of concerns’ required before the CQC acts.
If the DoH is still giving out such an incorrect impression, it’s hardly surprising that we mere mortals also had that impression that the CSCI involved itself in individual incidents. It never has done – although it gave the impression that it did.
If you haven’t been there already, here’s the link to the ‘now closed’ petitions re. Health, wellbeing and care, which give an idea of the way some of them have worked in the past, and the number of signatures achieved too – plus the responses to the petitions:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/list/closed?cat=557
You can enter any phrase, such as ‘residential care’ into the ‘search petitions’ box – and see what comes up. Remember to click on the ‘closed’ tab, once you’ve searched because there are no open petitions now.
My first suggestions on the wording of the petiton:
“...... the monitoring of Adult Social Care is inadequate and does not ensure ....”
and change “I ask” to “We ask ....”
It seems that the online petition site won’t be up and running until July, so if we keep bumping up this thread, so that it doesn’t vanish off the end, you’ll hopefully get more suggestions. I’ll think about it a bit more, if that’s ok.
Thanks again, Tina, for such an important thread.