Care Commission National Quality and Consistency Forum (children’s services)

23 February 2009, Compass House, Dundee

The agenda for this meeting is available on the members’ section of the CCPS website at along with notes from previous meetings of the group.

The following items were discussed and may be of interest to CCPS members:

Care Commission strategic plan

At the last meeting of this group in September, and at the CCPS meeting in December, stakeholders had an opportunity to comment on the Care Commission strategic plan. Comments from these events and other consultations have been taken on board and the plan has now been signed off by Ministers. A copy should appear on the Care Commission website by mid-March, with printed copies being distributed by the end of March.

Appeals procedure

The issue of the Care Commission appeals procedure was discussed at the last meeting of this group. It was confirmed at this meeting that there are no plans at present to revisit the appeals procedure at this stage. This is because to change the procedure would require a review of the whole complaints procedure, which would require consultation and Ministerial approval. It has therefore been decided to wait until the review of complaints handling (across the scrutiny bodies) announces its findings before looking at the CC procedure, as there are likely to be implications for the CC procedure in the more general review.

Annual returns

The closing date for annual returns is 2 March. Some concern was expressed that a high number of services for children, particularly childminders and day services, have not yet submitted their returns. There was some discussion around the electronic annual return, and it was acknowledged that there had been some problems with the staffing section of the form, although these have now been fixed.

Scrutiny Review update

Richard Lyall of the Scottish Government gave a presentation updating on progress of the scrutiny review and plans for the development of two new scrutiny bodies, one for health and one for social care, which will be taken forward as part of the Public Service Reform Bill– a copy of his presentation is available on the members section of the CCPS website using the link above. Following the presentation, the following issues were discussed:

  • The main purpose of the legislation is to ensure that the existing functions of the regulators are carried out by the new bodies, but there may be some minor changes to what is in the current legislation, for example to allow the new social care body to be more flexible around definitions of service categories;
  • The primary legislation will be quite general in scope, and the priority is to get this passed. Other changes may be made in secondary legislation to a longer time scale, and providers will have more input at this stage of the process;
  • Decisions about how the new scrutiny body will look/operate (from 2011) will be taken at a later stage – most changes would most likely be consulted on;
  • The issue of the crossover between regulators and local authority contract monitoring sections was raised, and it was acknowledged that this issue has been raised with those working on the Bill. Work on this area is ongoing, but largely outside of the context of the Bill.

Quality Assessment Framework and Grading

The Care Commission are finding a high level of coherence and consistency of grading across the board, although there are one or two notable exceptions that the Care Commission is looking into. Members of the group were asked for feedback on how the inspection process is going, and the following issues were raised:

  • Providers would welcome more guidance and best practice from CCOs e.g. when a 3 is awarded, advice on how to improve to a 4 would be useful
  • Providers need to develop the confidence toinitiate debate withCCOs where they feel that grades awarded are not as they believe theyshould be
  • Where providers are unhappy with gradings or the way in which an inspection has been carried out, they are encouraged to take this up with the CCO or regional manager
  • Because of the changes brought in, the Care Commission has reported to Ministers that it will not complete 100% of inspections this year
  • While evidence is necessary to convince CCOs of practice that is not demonstrated during the inspection visit, evidence should not be produced merely for inspectors; the CC is moving away from a position where “everything must be evidencedon paper, photos, etc”
  • From next year, reports will start with a summary sheet stating what the service does well and where it could improve
  • Electronic self-evaluations can be updated on an ongoing-basis and saved online to allow changes to be reflected during the year, and only submitted when requested.

Inspection Focus Areas

For next year inspection focus area for residential services for children will be medicines management and for early years services will be the Early Years Framework (in particular parental involvement). Safer Recruitment will also be revisited during inspections; national organisations should have this inspected once centrally, not during every service inspection.

Date of next meeting: 4 June 2009 and 2 October 2009