To absolutely no-one’s surprise the report confirmed CQC’s ambitious plan was a failure. Despite an eye watering £99 million (of public money) being spent as of July 2024 on CQC’s ‘overhaul’, only 28% of the proposed deliverables have been signed off – with some areas achieving 0% delivery.

It is difficult to think of any other situation in which this state of affairs would be conceivable.

Overall, the report made the following key findings:

1. The primary cause of technological issues stemmed from the broader organisational transformation that was not effectively supported by the IT system;

2. An overly complex assessment process, poor user experience and low adoption rates of using the portal for notifications had contributed to the problems;

3. Cultural issues within CQC also played a part – the report identified that 62% of those surveyed reported that their physical or mental health were being affected by the IT failures.

A total of 23 recommendations were made, with the caveat that ‘it is impossible to build an effective enabling technical solution to support a suite of business processes if the latter are immature’. In other words, CQC need to figure out what they are doing before trying to build an IT system that works.

It would be remiss not the mention that Peter Gill did note that some aspects of the system were said to be working well – specifically in relation to improved data capture. The rub is that ‘culturally data is not seen as a strategic asset’.

Peter quite rightly notes in his report that ‘the CQC is a “data business”, handling (and being reliant upon) large volumes of data at every step of the Service Value Chain (SVC) from contact, notification, registration through assessment, inspection and finally enforcement.’ Not only do CQC seem to think that this information is not important, but a specific example of a data breach was given in the appendices in which it was noted that CQC have absolutely no idea how the breach happened. If that is the case, it seems to suggest there may be many data breaches that have not been identified.

The blind dogmatic attitude of leaders to maintain a positive, yet false, narrative was described as ‘toxic positivity’ and the very clear point made that the system was designed by people who do not use it and who don’t ‘understand the role of an inspector/registration colleague or what and how we regulate.’

Once you can get past the insane spend and lack of progress the report is not all doom and gloom – ultimately Peter Gill is of the view that the IT system is salvageable with some significant work. That work will ultimately depend on CQC getting the rest of its house in order.

The sheer amount of work CQC has to do to try and salvage things is starting to look dangerously close the level of the ‘overhaul’ that got them in this mess in the first place.

Our Health and Social Care Team at RWK Goodman have been monitoring developments at CQC.