CQC admits to failed recruitment processes
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- Published: Thursday, 31 July 2014 05:45
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The Care Quality Commission has admitted that scores of its inspectors were appointed despite falling short of its own recruitment standards, creating the risk that its regulatory judgments could be “impaired”, reports the Health Service Journal. Details of the CQC’s “significantly flawed” recruitment process, which ran from January to December 2012, were laid out in an internal report, presented to its audit committee in March.
The report revealed that the watchdog, which inspects thousands of health and social care organisations each year, employed 134 applicants in 2012 who “failed some or all of its recruitment activities”. Of that group 121 are still in post, the CQC told HSJ. The CQC currently employs 1,031 inspectors, meaning more than one in 10 was appointed under the defective regime.
The procedure breaches - reported to senior managers in June 2013 - meant some staff “may have lacked the competencies required to undertake the work for which they were employed”, the report said. There remains a “residual risk” to the CQC’s regulatory judgments. “This in essence implies that our regulatory judgments may be impaired as we have not always appointed staff with the core competencies required to do the job properly, and they may not have received appropriate training to bring them up to the standard required,” the report says.
CQC chief executive David Behan told HSJ: “As soon as this issue was brought to our attention, we investigated the operation of our recruitment processes in 2012. From this, it became clear that our process at the time had not been followed consistently. Having identified this, it has been reported to our audit and corporate governance committee and during a public board meeting.
“To reflect the fundamental changes that we have made to the way we regulate health and adult social care in England, we now recruit people with specialist experience in healthcare, primary medical services, and adult social care and our recruitment approach has been updated to reflect this. This issue is not about individual inspectors but about the systems and processes used at the time, which we have changed. All of our inspection staff, regardless of when they were or are appointed, receive training, are subject to a probationary period, regular performance management reviews, one-to-ones, and their work is quality assured.”
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