Our relationship with you will contribute to our monitoring activity.
We will allocate a relationship holder to every provider and location to develop a consistent understanding of your organisation and strengthen our relationship with you.
Your CQC relationship holder will either be an Inspector, Inspection Manager or Head of Hospital Inspection. We will try to keep the same person as far as possible. They should be your first point of contact with CQC. You can contact your relationship holder if you have any queries about your registration or if you need to tell us about any significant changes to your services (for example, if your service begins formally collaborating with others).
Your relationship holder may contact you for a number of reasons. For example, if our monitoring of your service suggests a significant improvement or deterioration in the quality of care, your relationship holder may ask you to explain the reasons behind this.
Where individual services are part of a larger or corporate provider, there may be a different relationship holder for the service level and the provider level. In this case, we will share information internally to gain a better understanding of quality across a provider, and reduce duplication.
Relationship meetings
You and your relationship holder will maintain contact through relationship management meetings. We will hold these meetings at least annually at provider and location level, either in person or by telephone. For larger organisations we are likely to meet more frequently.
Before a relationship management meeting, your relationship holder will review information we hold about the service, including from CQC Insight where available. If it suggests an improvement or deterioration in the quality of care for a service, we may ask you for further information, or to explain the reasons for this during the meeting.
If a provider has any significant concerns about quality, we expect you to raise them with your relationship holder, either as part of regular contact or at any time where a concern arises, and to tell us about the action you are taking to address them. If the provider has commissioned any external reviews, you should also disclose these to us as a matter of course.