Kings Fund says health and care services are at full stretch and struggling to maintain standards.
The annual assessment of health and social care by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) found that most services are good and many providers have improved the quality and safety of care since inspections.
However, the report indicates variations between and within services and evidence of growing pressures on staff and deterioration of quality in some services. Adult social care is identified as a particular concern.
Challenges for NHS, government, and CQC as seen by Kings Fund
- NHS must learn lessons from those trusts that are performing well even in the face of financial and operational pressures.
- Government needs to find a sustainable solution for the future funding of adult social care.
- CQC needs to use the intelligence and understanding it has acquired to support improvements in care and not just to hold up a mirror to how services perform now. It also has more work to do to assess the performance of local systems of care as well as the organisations providing care.
- CQC’s warnings about the perilous state of some services could have the unintended effect of strengthening the focus on these operational matters at the expense of work to transform care.
- Securing the future of health and social care depends on doing things differently, not doing more of the same a bit better