Inspection programme - dignity and nutrition for older people – Care Quality Commission.

What is this inspection programme about?

This review is a targeted inspection programme of NHS hospitals looking at whether older people are treated with respect and how they are helped with food and drink when they need it.

Each inspection team will be led by one of our professional inspectors and include a practising, experienced NHS nurse. These professionals will be joined by an ‘expert by experience’, an older person who has received hospital care and who can give the patient perspective.

The programme will allow us to use our existing methods and systems to look at specific parts of the new essential standards of quality and safety – in this case, aspects of Outcome 1 (respecting and involving people) and Outcome 5 (meeting nutritional needs). It will help us to gauge the general quality of care in these areas, and give us valuable information when looking at the same issues in other sectors.

We will start the programme in February 2011 and we expect to complete the inspections in four months.

What services will we be looking at?

We will inspect selected wards in about 100 NHS hospitals. We will choose hospitals to visit partly on what we already know about how well they are doing and partly at random.

How will we carry out the programme?

The inspection visits will be unannounced. The teams will be led by CQC compliance inspectors, with responsibility for the overall management of the inspection. They will be supported by:

·         External nurse advisers ­– senior nursing staff who have broad experience and current ‘on the ground’ responsibilities, so that they can check clinical practice against current professional guidance.

·         Experts by experience – people who can provide the perspective of patients.

We will collect the views of patients on the wards we visit and we will also use feedback we already hold from local involvement networks and other local groups.

An independent panel of representatives from charities, advocates and other stakeholder organisations will provide expert advice to the programme.

During their visits, the inspection teams will use parts of the observation tool that we designed with the Royal College of Nursing to assess compliance with Outcome 5.

If we find any major concerns at a particular provider, we will ask our regional compliance teams to look into the matter further and take swift regulatory action where needed without interrupting the ongoing inspection programme.

We will publish the results from individual inspections as they are produced, following our usual processes. These will give a snapshot of our findings on a specific ward or wards at the time of our visit, rather than a complete picture of behaviour across an entire hospital.

We will also draw these findings together in an overview report at the end of the programme.