CQC publishes second part of independent review into its regulation of Whorlton Hall

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has today published the second report of Professor Glynis Murphy’s independent review of its regulation of Whorlton Hall between 2015 and 2019.

CQC commissioned Professor Murphy to conduct an independent review to look at whether the abuse of patients at Whorlton Hall could have been recognised earlier by the regulatory process and to make recommendations for how CQC can improve its regulation of similar services in the future.

In addition, CQC asked Professor Murphy to conduct a review of international research evidence to look at how abuse is detected within services for adults with a learning disability and autistic people and how such detection can be improved.

The first report of Professor Murphy’s review was published in March 2020 and made a number of recommendations for CQC to strengthen its inspection and regulatory approach for mental health, learning disability and/or autism services. The second report outlines the progress that CQC has made to implement the recommendations. This includes publication of the final report of its review of restraint, seclusion and segregation; work on closed cultures and the development of a tool for rating support plans.

Professor Murphy makes a further five recommendations relating to:

  • Services should not be rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ if they have used frequent restraint, seclusion and segregation.
  • Services should not be rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ if they cannot show how they support whistleblowing and reporting of concerns.
  • Trialling of the Group Home Culture Scale tool, to evaluate whether it helps inspectors determine which settings have closed cultures.
  • Trialling of the Quality of Life tool to gauge whether it helps CQC move from evaluating process, towards evaluating more relevant service user outcomes.
  • Development of guidelines for when evidence of the quality of care should be gathered from overt or covert surveillance.