Firstly, I want to thank everyone working in general practice, who are continuing to work in challenging circumstances to deliver care to people who need it, often in new and innovative ways.
I am writing to you today to update you on our current regulatory approach in general practice and how we plan to develop this over the next few months.
Throughout the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic our regulatory role has not changed, and we continue to ensure that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care. At the start of the pandemic we moved quickly to support providers to keep people safe, including pausing routine inspections and redeploying some of our staff to front line services.
During this period we have continued to only carry out focused inspections in response to immediate risks and concerns about safety, and have continued to monitor services and engage with providers to identify where extra support is needed. We also developed and continue to use the Emergency Support Framework (ESF), I want to emphasise that ESF conversations are not an inspection and the outcome of the conversations they support will not be a regulatory judgement or rating, and to minimise burden there is no expectation that providers will need to undertake work to prepare for an ESF conversation. They are designed to be supportive conversations by helping us understand the specific stresses and challenges a provider is facing, and where a provider may be using innovative ways to manage.
We are aware that services have been operating under enormous strain during the pandemic, and know that the impact of COVID-19 both directly and indirectly is not going to diminish in the coming months.
As a result we are thinking about what our transitional regulatory approach needs to be. This will start in September and focus on services where we have evidence that people may be at risk or that care needs to be improved. This will not mean a return to our pre COVID-19 inspection programme. The pandemic has provided significant learning for us around what effective regulation looks like. We have seen significant changes to the way care is delivered and transformation of general practice services and we will need to reflect this in the way we regulate.
This may mean a move away from frequency-based inspections and using more information we hold about not only individual providers, but also about local systems to understand where there are barriers to good care. This will also enable us to better target our activity at providers and systems where it’s needed most to help break down these barriers and not add burden for those providers who are delivering good care.
Above all, to ensure our regulatory approach supports providers to improve care, it’s important we work with you to develop it. So over the next few months we will be engaging with providers, professionals, the public and other stakeholders in a number of different ways to help shape our transitional approach. This will help us ensure it effectively identifies risks and concerns around safety, supports providers to deliver good quality care and keeps the needs of people who use services at heart of what we do.
We’ll share more information about how you can get involved in this work in our provider bulletin, and there are already opportunities to feedback on a number of areas through our digital engagement platform. We’ll also update you on the development of our transitional approach through our bulletin
Your feedback on our transitional regulatory approach will also support the development of our future strategy and our longer term regulatory approach.
Finally, I wanted to thank you again for all the work you are doing to ensure people receive high quality care through a very challenging period.
Yours sincerely
Dr Rosie Benneyworth
Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care.
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