OHP – Now a CQC Registered Provider
As from July 2017 OHP is a CQC registered provider. This is part of our final step to becoming a recognised organisation in our own right delivering patient care from a single large GP provider
I have been working on this since March 2016, says Lesley Evans our Operations Director. When I started working on this CQC did not have a clear process for the registration of OHP due to our unique autonomy model and the way the partnership has been created. Their existing rules were not suitable because they would have required all of our 155 partners (the number of partners that we had when first exploring this) to be added to the registration and each time one partner left or a new partner started a new registration would have had to be submitted – clearly not sustainable from OHP or CQC’s point of view.
However CQC were very open to discussion and with them I explored a number of options with CQC and reviewed our partnership deed with their legal team and once CQC understood our structure and governance arrangements we could start to move forward.
We resolved that our 7 GP partners that form part of the OHP Board would be part of our registration and we started this proc. Our Board GPs become the accountable persons to deliver the regulated activities across our OHP practices. There were still barriers to climb over!
How do we include all our practices?
How do we deal with practices that operate out of more than one building?
What about Registered Manager status?
How do we deal with practices that have done yet been inspected ?
We have dealt with each issue together with the CQC registration team who have been pragmatic in their approach.
It is fair to say that we have uncovered some issues within our practices – where some of our practices (inadvertently) have not been adhering to the cqc regulations – we hope with the intense work that we have undertaken we have addressed the short-comings
Where are we now…
We are now registered under CQC and are currently in the process of adding all of our practices to the registration. There are a small number where there are minor issues that we are dealing with
So what are the benefits to our practices …
We know that all our practices are fully compliant with all CQC regulations and therefore are not operating ‘outside the law’
I have met with CQC Inspection management team and agreed a joint management way forward to ensure that there are no surprises – and therefore practices may …not be routinely inspected
There will be on-going discussions with CQC and OHP governance team to manage the monitoring and inspections process going forward – no panic approach to inspection any longer
Partners at practices are no longer named on CQC register – except the Registered Manager – OHP GP partners are now responsible for the delivery of regulated activities at all of OHP practices.
CQC fee considerable less
Going forward ….
We have provided a clinical governance system to use in all our practices to ensure that standards are improved and there is shared learning across our 47 locations.
Our next steps …
is to embed our clinical governance system and to work collectively with our practices and CQC. I will provide details of this in my next blog.