April 2010... Is Your Organisation Ready?

The forthcoming Care Quality Commission (CQC) change from standards to regulations based on outcomes will result in a shift away from policies, systems and processes towards a quality experience for staff and users and users of healthcare services.

On first inspection, readers of the new CQC Regulations may be forgiven in believing that Equality & Diversity (E&D) requirements have been diluted, but a closer look and the penny drops, the bar has been raised and E&D demands will be greater than ever before.

Firstly, there is a change of approach.  The current C7e Standard, challenging discrimination, promoting equality and respecting human rights, with its elements and lines of enquiry is fairly prescriptive and tells you what you need to put in place.  The new regulations are more subtle and organisations will be measured and assessed on what people say and their actual experience, rather than what systems they put in place.

Secondly, there is a clear focus on outcomes, based on the patient experience.  The Regulations require providers to take care to ensure that care and treatment is provided to service users with due regard to their age, sex, religious persuasion, sexual orientation, racial origin, cultural and linguistic background and any disability they may.   This means that staff will need to understand what things are important to people who use services in relation to their care, treatment and support.

Regarding outcomes, people who use services must be able to express their views, be involved in making decisions about their care, treatment and support and have their privacy, dignity and independence respected.  It is clear that organisations will need to place a much greater emphasis on equality monitoring in relation to service provision in the future. 

Access to services and attendance rates for booked appointments and procedures will need to be monitored by equality strands.  Furthermore, monitoring data often shows significantly higher non-attendance rates for some ethnic and other equality groups.

Patient complaints will also need to be monitored by equality strands to demonstrate that the organisation has eliminated discrimination from its systems.  Patient surveys will also need to be monitored by equality strands.  Currently, monitoring is often restricted to gender and age and this will need to be expanded to include other equality groups.  Survey questions will also need to be built into patient surveys to cover equality and diversity issues to demonstrate compliance with required outcomes.

Finally, at the same time, organisations will still need to ensure that they are fully compliant with equality legislation, for example, compliant Equality Schemes and robust initial and full Equality Impact Assessments.

Vincent Hodges