Quis custodiet?

This morning I get up to a piece in the FT (reference 3) about an interim report into the affairs of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the Dash Review, said to have been published yesterday.

Trying to find this interim report draws a blank, but I do learn that the extensive media coverage is all dated midnight Thursday-Friday. So although the coverage talks of a published report, perhaps members of the public have to wait until the civil servants who mind the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) website get in on Friday morning. Those at CQC do seem to be on the case, but not to the extent of sharing the report. See reference 4.

And I have also learned, I think for the first time, that the popular Latin tag 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes' was a doubtful quotation from Juvenal in the context of keeping an eye on one's wife. Not public administration, civil or otherwise. See reference 1. I also associate to my remarks about using Latin tags at reference 2. This tag is, however, a convenient way of capturing one aspect of the problems at and around the CQC.

Try again later.

PS 1: not at all convinced about the DHSC website being largely lost inside the one-size-fits-all 'GOV.UK' of reference 5.

PS 2: some hours later, around 11:00 Friday local time: still no interim report, but we do now have a joint press release from the shiny new Secretary of State and the not so shiny DHSC. See reference 6.

PS 3: 18:00 Friday: a (blue underline) link has now appeared at reference 6 which takes one to an HTML version of the interim report. A bit of fiddling about with the Microsoft print function and I now have my very own pdf version. I shall be taking a look later.

PS 4: 19:00: my first impression on looking at this report is that the CQC was not given the resources needed to tackle its very considerable task. Maybe also, more was expected of it than was reasonable. I am reminded of an observation from a civil service old-timer of the early 1980s about paying peanuts and getting monkeys. All part of the Tory scheme to take so many resources out of the public health and social care systems that people gave up and went private. Hopefully that will now be put into reverse.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/classical-and-literary-allusions.html.

Reference 3: NHS safety regulator found to have ‘significant internal failings’: Care Quality Commission’s shortcomings are ‘hampering’ its ability to identify poor performance, says independent review - Laura Hughes, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 4: https://www.cqc.org.uk/news/stories/response-interim-findings-dash-review.

Reference 5: https://www.gov.uk/.

Reference 6: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-acts-after-report-highlights-failings-at-regulator.