Our team has spent the last few months putting in lots of hard work in order to ensure our registration with the Care Quality Commission.

This week, we received the fantastic news that our application has been accepted! Find out why this was important to us, and how we went about it.

Why did we want CQC registration?

As we’re healthcare provider, CQC registration is a requirement under the Health and Social Care Act 2008. We need to be registered before we provide healthcare services.

As well as being a legal requirement, it allows us to have a greater degree of confidence in the services we provide. We’ve had an independent regulator cross-check our services, which gives us confidence that we’re currently providing healthcare according to best practice.

What are the five standards of CQC care?

There are five key questions at the heart of how the CQV regulate and ask of all healthcare providers.

• Are we safe?
  This means that CQC are confident we’ve done all we can to ensure our patients are free from abuse, and avoidable harm.

• Are we effective?
  We want to ensure the treatment our patients receive is as effective as possible. This means it has good outcomes, is evidence-based and suits you.
• Are we caring?
  In order to get CQC registration, we’ve ensured our care team treat patients with kindness and respect.
• Are we responsive?
  Organisation and processes are very important to us. We do all we can to ensure we are organised in the best way possible to meet the needs of our patients.
• Are we well-led?
  Our senior management team is in charge of ensuring we provide high-quality care. It’s really important to us that our team has a fair and open culture, where learning, development and innovation are prioritised.

What did preparing for CQC registration involve?

A big part of what we did involved ensuring all our planned processes align with CQC regulations. This involved our processes across the board - from clinical processes, HR processes, onboarding processes, complaints processes, data protection processes, ensuring our staff are DBS checked, and a lot more.

We also undertook clinical audits to ensure we’ll be providing the best care we can, and that we have clear processes in place to improve our standards of care.

We had some of our managerial team take part in an extensive interview by CQC inspectors which took around 3-4 hours. They were asked questions about what they do at Suvera, how our remote clinic works, and how they’d deal with challenges they may come across in delivering primary care.