Understanding regulators’ priorities can help care and housing providers focus their improvements and proactively address any issues before inspections and potential enforcement action.

We have just published an update on the last 12 months of prosecutions by both the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which identifies the current regulatory trends and provides some key messages that we have taken away from recent prosecutions. 

Key messages

• CQC prosecutions continue to rise and fines for successful prosecutions remain high. The CQC are also continuing to use its enforcement powers to hold individuals to account either instead of or as well as providers.
• Failure to adequately mitigate the risks in relation to falls, absconding or self-inflicted injuries remains a common trend in prosecutions against health and social care providers over the past 12 months. 
• The HSE have made a significant number of prosecutions against organisations for failure to properly plan, manage and monitor the work being undertaken, particularly in relation to work being done at height. 

In our full briefing we also emphasise the need not only to assess and put in pace measures to address care quality and safety risks, but also to ensure that those measures are being implement by employees. 

For more information on the issues that regulators are currently prioritising, please contact us.