Everybody has the right to receive safe, high-quality care. If we find that care has fallen short of this, we use our powers to take action against those responsible.
The CQC inspect GP practices, giving them a rating to help you choose the right care. As well as GPs, we inspect out-of-hours or mobile doctor services, walk-in centres, minor injury units and urgent care centres. You can use their inspection reports and ratings to help you understand the quality of care.
Why we take action
They have the power to take action to:
- · Protect you from harm and make sure you receive care that meets the standards you have a right to expect.
- · Make sure services improve if the standard of care they provide has fallen below acceptable levels.
- · Hold care providers and managers to account for failures in how care is provided.
What action we take depends on how the problems we've identified affect the people who use the service and how serious they are.
Our powers
The action they can take includes:
- · Using requirement notices or warning notices to set out what improvements the care provider must make and by when.
- · Making changes to a care provider's registration to limit what they may do, for example by imposing conditions for a given time.
- · Placing a provider in special measures, where we closely supervise the quality of care while working with other organisations to help them improve within set timescales.
- · Hold the care provider to account for their failings by:
- · issuing simple cautions
- · issuing fines
- prosecuting cases where people are harmed or placed in danger of harm.
Keeping you informed
We will include details of the action we take in our inspection reports and clearly show on the care provider's pages on our website when we are using our powers.