Regulating health & social care – with and without borders

There is now considerable interest in regulatory health systems to provide safe and quality care to patients and users of services. The UK government in England has recently established an integrated super regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), to undertake this task and to oversee standards in health and social care.

While a range of regulatory processes has existed for some time, these have not always been well co-ordinated or appropriate for the task of managing both health and social care systems on equal grounds. Steps are now being taken to resolve this situation.

The CQC will both utilize the good practice of its predecessor bodies and also examine a range of potential new risk-based models for regulation, including those that have already been developed for other areas of public service in England. In particular, the lessons learned from the development of systems for improving school standards, through inspection and other mechanisms, over the past 15 years by The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) will provide important evidence regarding appropriate scrutiny and improvement systems in the health and social care sectors.

The CQC is aspiring to be a world class health regulator and it is anticipated that the models developed by the CQC will provide other countries with exemplary ways of regulating their own health and social care systems. In turn the CQC is keen to learn from the experiences of other countries.