A regular question asked of the Compass NE team:

 

 

Do you HAVE to fill in a PCA?    

 

 

PCA’s were and remain optional for Providers to complete.

 

The Care Quality Commission CQC placed much emphasis on these when they were trying to enforce self-regulation on the Social Care sector. As we now know, they were unable to effectually regulate relying on self-assessment and this resulted in Winterbourne View / Castlebeck. As political fallout of this, the CQC approached the Department of Health for an additional £15 million, with a view to recruiting additional inspectors so they can now resource inspections for Social Care providers yearly.

 

Now that Social Care Providers will be inspected yearly, the CQC have moved away from using PCA’s as a self-regulatory tool, and are pushing this into a self-governance tool. By this I mean, it is an attempt to encourage Providers who do not sufficiently self-audit to do so. As I am sure you are aware, not all Providers are good. Therefore if Providers examine their activities; actively looking for areas of non-compliance, and fix those areas, this will help to drive up the standards across the sector. We must be clear what a Regulator actually does. It is not to offer advice and guidance, but to make judgments of performance against compliance with the legislation and report on that only.

 

The Health and Social Care Act 2008 is very much based on the experience of the service user.

 

It’s not a clinical audit, but a judgment on three areas:

 

Are you safe, are you effective and do you meet the needs of your service user?

 

I am sure that you will answer yes to those three questions.

Compass NE’s PCA Workshops, Guides and Memberships are to help you PROVE IT! (As is the position of a good inspector.)

 

Referring back to where we started, PCA’s are not mandatory. However, auditing your provision and informing the CQC as to the results of this is mandatory. If you have a better system to do this than the PCA’s, then excellent, I would suggest you continue to use that. If you don’t, the CQC PCA is as good a method as any other. However, information will be requested and you are obliged to supply it, in whatever format you see fit.