Care Quality Commission registration

All social care and healthcare providers have to be registered with the Care Quality Commission (which replaced the Healthcare Commission), which assess hospital trusts on a series of measures and standards for patient care and management.

The CQC has regulatory and enforcement powers across all of health and social care in England. They are responsible for determining the standards we must achieve, they will inspect us periodically to check we are meeting those standards and by law, they have powers to close services if standards are not met.

We have registered five locations with CQC:

• Southampton General Hospital - our main hospital site
• Princess Anne Hospital – local and regional centre for women’s services
• Countess Mountbatten House – hospice, palliative care services
• New Forest Birth Centre, Ashurst - midwifery-led services
• Royal South Hants hospital - a small number of outpatients' services

We have registered to provide the following services: 

• Treatment of disease, disorder or injury
• Surgical procedures
• Diagnostic and screening procedures
• Maternity and midwifery services
• Transport services, triage and medical advice provided remotely

In January 2011 the CQC inspected Southampton General Hospital and found it to be compliant with all 16 of the Essential Standards of Quality and Safety. Download the CQC Review of Compliance 2011|.

For more reports and information about our services, please see the SUHT pages on the CQC website|.

Replacing Standards for Better Health

The new CQC registration requirements replace the old Standards for Better Health| requirements with which trusts had to comply.

There are some key differences:

1. Under Standards for Better Health, we assessed ourselves against 44 standards and made a single declaration of compliance to the Healthcare Commission. Under CQC we must register every location where we provide services and for each location we need to look at our compliance against 28 regulations of the Health and Social Care Act.
2. Standards for Better Health asked us to evidence we had appropriate systems, processes and policies in place, for example that we have a complaints policy in place which is known and understood and in use by staff across the organisation. For CQC registration we need to demonstrate that the systems we have in place are resulting in positive outcomes and experiences for patients.  So in the example of complaints, what we now need to show is how we are using our complaints process to improve services and what those improvements have been.

See our latest Standards for Better Health submission|, for the transitional year between systems.