QUALITY REGULATION

5 November

The seminar will focus on regulating to maintain the quality and safety of healthcare, including the relationship between service and professional regulation, and will seek to consider some of the key issues and questions, and key challenges that exist.

The session will be chaired by Nigel Edwards, acting chief executive of the NHS Confederation, who will provide a short introduction, briefly setting the context for discussion and recapping on the key points from the earlier seminar on economic regulation.

There will then be two short contributions from Cynthia Bower, chief executive of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), and Sally Brearley, lay member of the National Quality Board, setting out their perspective on what should be the job of quality regulation and how it should be discharged.

It will also be helpful to think about the type of regulatory system that may be needed in the healthcare system that may emerge as a result of the White Paper proposals.

Of particular interest may be questions such as:

·  What should be the proper role for quality regulation for healthcare and what should be its primary objectives?

·  What key principles should underpin healthcare regulation?

·  What can be reasonably be expected of regulation?

·  What are public expectations of regulation and how can they be met?

·  How can we make regulation more proactive? Can it help to prevent high profile failures of care?

·  To what extent should regulation go beyond considerations just of safety?

·  What are the links between service regulation and professional regulation and the importance of sharing information and co-ordinated action?

·  What is the balance and the relationship between individual professional responsibility, board responsibility, local scrutiny and oversight and the national regulator?

·  How can we better link quality regulation and clinical governance?

·  What should be the objectives and the key role and functions of a regulator for healthcare?

·  What information is needed to drive effective quality regulation and how do we avoid it becoming over-bureaucratic?

·  What should a more risk-based approach to healthcare regulation look like and how can we achieve it? Or are risk-based approaches to healthcare regulation unacceptable because of the risk of failure?

·  What should HealthWatch look like/ how independent and autonomous should it be from the CQC.

·  What is the role of regulation in ‘post bureaucratic public services’?

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