Quality Statements

Preparation time

If you are not already familiar with the Regulations, the average time you need to reserve to study all the content, including Best Practice and Regulations, can vary between 5 hours for the simpler statements to 15 days for the more complex statements.

As an example, Safeguarding lists 16 “Additional legislation” and 27 documents on “Best Practice Guidance”. The CQC states “We expect providers to be aware of and follow the following best practice guidance”, where some documents are more than a hundred pages; making the total reading list in the region of some 3,000 pages on this single Quality Statement.

The theory: What the CQC expects

1. Read Quality Statements, the Regulations, and Best Practice
2. Draft your Policies
3. Create your processes
4. Train all your staff
5. Monitor and improve

The challenge: Implementing everything

Quality Statements
Familiarising yourself with all 34 Quality Statements is relatively easy and will probably take 1 to 2 days to read and absorb.
Reading every related Regulation and Best Practice could take between 2 to 6 months if done as a full-time activity, working on this continuously every working day.

Policies
The CQC lists a limited number of core policies they require at initial registration, but once trading commences, each inspector exercises their own judgement at local level for any other policy they deem relevant. Preparing for every eventuality would entail researching and drafting hundreds of policies, and could take 3 to 6 months at the minimum as a full-time activity.

Processes and Training
Writing bespoke processes for every scenario from all these documents would be another arduous task and could take 6 months to 1 year depending on the Provider type, and training each member of staff could take another 6 months to a year.

The Practice: What Providers usually do

Smaller Providers will generally ignore the official documents altogether and subscribe to a Policies Library service, which gives them access to hundreds of policies containing a standard process.
Their entire governance system will be based on the document library, only referring to the Regulations and Best Practice documents as needed

Complex and Enterprise Providers with greater financial resources, have the advantage of being able to engage specialised staff, and devote resources to bespoke documents, processes, and governance systems.

The Regulatory System does not differentiate between smaller and complex or enterprise Providers.

Where an Inspector is familiar with the Provider Type, they will make appropriate adjustments to what can be reasonably expected from an SME. However, it is not uncommon to find an Inspector with a hospital inspection background asking for the same level or Corporate Governance from a sole trader with just 2 members of staff.