Councillors have heard about the preparedness of Middlesbrough Council ahead of an “imminent” inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
Erik Scollay, who is the Director of Adult Social Care and Health Integration at Middlesbrough Council, gave a presentation entitled ‘CQC Readiness’ to councillors at the People Scrutiny Panel on Monday 14 October.
He aimed to outline when the inspection will take place and what it involves and explained the Care Quality Commission now does “local authority assessments”.
He said: “It’s a return to the sort of inspections that we see with Ofsted”, which is something that had not been experienced in “excess of a decade”.
County Durham is the only authority in the North East to have been through the entirety of the new process and their overall rating was ‘good’.
The inspection will evaluate the council’s delivery of its duties under Part 1 of the Care Act 2014. Mr Scollay said he was expecting the inspectors to be on site for three days during the week commencing 28 October. The key domains that will be evaluated are safety, effectiveness, caring, responsiveness, and leadership.
When providing information, he said the CQC “wanted us to provide to them a list of 50 cases”. From that larger group, the CQC have “selected 10 and we expect that they will go out and visit six. So during their time on site, the inspectors will go and talk to the families, to the carers, to the individuals themselves for six cases that they have selected.”
Middlesbrough Independent Councillors Association (MICA) Councillor Sharon Platt quizzed Mr Scollay about what his criteria was with regards to selecting cases.
He responded that “it wasn’t random” and perimeters were set for cases “that demonstrated involvement in particular sorts of mental health cases, they wanted cases that involved individuals with carer service in place”.
The relevant Head of Service was instructed to “extract a number of cases that fit into these criteria”. Mr Scollay continued that CQC decided that 50 was enough to have a representative sample. “You want to represent yourself as honestly as possible, but you also want to showcase the good work that is done, so there is a line to be walked there. We certainly didn’t expend a whole load of energy cherry picking cases.”
Mr Scollay and Cllr Platt agreed that six cases is a small number to look at, with Mr Scollay saying he was initially “surprised”.
Mr Scollay also spoke about the strengths and areas for improvement prior to the inspection. He said: “We’ve got a really effective Home Improvement Agency here in Middlesbrough and we know it’s really effective, not just because of the positive feedback we get from users of services but also because we keep winning awards with it.”
He also discussed areas of development, outlining that “we do have issues around housing shortages, accommodation, temporary accommodation and the pipeline into more sustained tenancies for people with issues around homelessness. That’s one of the pieces of work going on and one of the council’s transformation themes at the minute.”
During Mr Scollay’s presentation, there were three slides of strengths and a singular slide of areas for development. This led to some comments and questioning from councillors. Labour Councillor Luke Henman said he appreciated “the honesty about the areas where we think there’s areas for development”.
He later asked if Mr Scollay was expecting any “surprises from the outcome”. Mr Scollay answered “the thing that has worried me above all else in terms of preparation for the inspection is for us to be seen as lacking self awareness.” He said he thought that they had been very open with CQC about their shortcomings.
Councillor Morgan McClintock followed this saying that Mr Scollay’s presentation had come across as “really positive”. Cllr McClintock asked if Mr. Scollay was concerned “with the press being here, and therefore were giving us a very positive view”.
Mr. Scollay responded that it “wouldn’t be a professional response for me to change my wording simply because the press were here, councillor.”
Cllr McClintock asked a follow up question checking that it isn’t likely for the council to receive a “poor report”.
“I expect that we will be a balance between areas that require improvement and areas that are good” and that it is currently unclear if that will result in a report that overall is rated as ‘good’ or ‘requires improvement’. He concluded: “I don’t expect us to be an inadequate local authority with adult social care.”
