If we all accept the need for the CQC to exist, and obviously, we don’t, but just supposing we did, then I’d accept that they’d want some sort of way of deciding who they were going to prioritise in terms of their inspections. And I’d accept that whatever this instrument turned out to be, it’d be blunt, measuring only what can be measured etcetera, but hey ho.
Anyway, blunt it is. Because, gloriously, my practice appears to be on the naughty step.
Why? Because despite our repeated efforts, we just can’t bludgeon the local demographic into accepting the value of those oh-so-important smears and flu jabs. Oh, and because we declined to get involved in regular multidisciplinary palliative care meetings on the basis that we’d rather spend the time actually looking after these patients rather than talking about them, which we can do whenever we like, anyway, when necessary, rather than at some arbitrary point over a Hob Nob.
And a further ‘oh’: our nurses didn’t score so well on a survey. Which is odd, given that those exact same nurses work for another practice in the same building and scored fine, which I think tells you more about the survey than the nurses.
All of which I could live with, particularly as the CQC is displaying an unexpected sense of irony in calling it ‘intelligent monitoring’.
But what really does sap the last vestige of morale is that this nonsense is made public, with the effects of crushing hardworking GPs further and sending their patients into a panic or other nearby ‘better’ GP lists. Shame on you, CQC.
Dr Tony Copperfield is a GP in Essex. You can follow him on Twitter @DocCopperfield.
