Recommendation F38: Use of information about compliance by regulator from: Complaints
From Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry, published 6 February 2013.
Recommendation
The Care Quality Commission should ensure as a matter of urgency that it has reliable access to all useful complaints information relevant to assessment of compliance with fundamental standards, and should actively seek this information out, probably via its local relationship managers. Any bureaucratic or legal obstacles to this should be removed.
In brief (written by this site)
In September 2024 commentary published in February 2026, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England reported that the recommendation was superseded, explaining that the Care Quality Commission gathers evidence on complaints through ongoing assessments and retains statutory powers to compel providers to share details (DHSC and NHS England, Feb 2026). In May 2024, the Thirlwall Inquiry legal team noted that the commission had previously integrated complaints information into its surveillance and inspection planning processes (The Thirlwall Inquiry legal team, May 2024).
AI-generated summary of the record on this page, checked by a second model and automatic checks, 26 Sep 2026. The record below is the sources' own words.
Government response
Accepted.
In June 2013, the Care Quality Commission issued A new start – Consultation on changes to the way the Care Quality Commission regulates, inspects and monitors care. This made clear that information from individual members of the public who make complaints, raise concerns and provide feedback about the quality and safety of their care would be a vital source of information and that a well-led service or organisation would have a good complaints procedure that drives improvement. On 17 October 2013, it published the responses to the consultation in A new start: Responses to our consultation on changes to the way the Care Quality Commission regulates, inspects and monitors care services, which showed that there is broad agreement with the new approach.
The Care Quality Commission already has a customer service centre which receives comments from the public, and it ensures that these comments are fed into inspections. No legal obstacles to the Care Quality Commission accessing information have been identified. Any bureaucratic obstacles to information sharing are being addressed through the development of information sharing protocols. The Care Quality Commission and the General Medical Council have published an operational protocol which sets out in detail how coordination and information sharing will work between the two regulators. The Care Quality Commission is in agreement with the Nursing and Midwifery Council that they will develop a similar joint working protocol by December 2013. Arrangements are in place for updated information sharing arrangements thereafter with the General Dental Council and the Health and Care Professions Council.
The Care Quality Commission is examining how it needs to develop its systems further to ensure that it can use feedback and complaints from all sources to inform its inspection system, and ensure that people contacting the Care Quality Commission with information are clear what the Care Quality Commission will do with that information, and what action it may take in response. This work will be shaped by findings set out in A review of the NHS hospitals complaints system: putting patients back in the picture, and to ensure that complaints information and feedback from people who use services is embedded consistently and given significant weighting, the Care Quality Commission has committed to develop the way it uses these in its surveillance model by early 2014.
How this response relates to the recommendation
Site note: This is volume two of "Hard Truths: The Journey to Putting Patients First" (Cm 8777-II), the government's response to the Inquiry's 290 recommendations, published by the Department of Health on GOV.UK on 19 November 2013 and dated to that day here. The PDF the row links to is the accessible edition, whose title page reads "January 2014". The Department of Health has been the Department of Health and Social Care since January 2018. The volume says it includes accounts from each of the national organisations the recommendations name, but it does not mark which passage each organisation wrote, so every row is filed under the Department that published it.
Blanket government agreement does not establish acceptance or delivery by each addressee. Some response passages cover groups of recommendations.
Scope of the government response
Government responded via "Hard Truths: The Journey to Putting Patients First" (2014), a single document covering all 290 recommendations with a blanket acceptance. Individual recommendation responses were not broken out.
Delivery
DHSC and NHS England state no delivery position (27 February 2026)
CQC have moved away from mandated ‘Provider Information Returns’ in sectors apart from Adult Social Care (ASC), which includes some basic questions about complaint numbers under the Quality assurance and risk management section.
In all sectors, evidence about complaints, and the complaints management process, is requested as part of ongoing assessment, and we have powers to compel providers to share details of complaints under Regulation 16(3)(a,b,c).
All providers and commissioners of NHS services are subject to a statutory duty to handle complaints in accordance with the requirements of the Local Authority, Social Services and National Health Service Complaint Regulations 2009 and the Health Service and Social Care Act 2008(Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. This includes primary care providers and independent sector providers.
In December 2022, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman issued Complaints Standards which include expectations on how providers and commissioners will handle complaints, together with a model complaint handling procedure and detailed guidance on how the Complaint Standards can be applied in practice.
The NHS Standard Contract requires providers to publish complaints monitoring reports (Schedule 6).
Site note: DHSC and NHS England's own account of progress, supplied to the Thirlwall Inquiry in September 2024 and printed in the Inquiry legal team's Review of Implementation of Recommendations from Previous Inquiries into Healthcare Issues (version dated April 2025, published 27 February 2026). It is not a finding of the Inquiry. Their reviewed extent of implementation reads “Superseded”. Table row: section 18.2 No. 38, PDF page 444.
Department of Health and Social Care says in progress (11 February 2015)
Ahead of any inspection, the Care Quality Commission requests a range of information relating to complaints from providers. This includes numbers of complaints, themes of complaints and the timeliness of resolution of complaints.
The Care Quality Commission will also ask providers to share with us any survey they have carried out of people who have complained to them in the last 12 months.
The new fundamental standards will place a legal requirement on registered providers to provide the Care Quality Commission with information about complaints.
Site note: This is the supporting annex published on 11 February 2015 with "Culture change in the NHS: applying the lessons of the Francis Inquiries" (Cm 9009), attached to the GOV.UK page as "Culture change in the NHS supporting annex". The annex has no title page; that title is GOV.UK's and the PDF's own. Its table has four columns (No., Recommendation, Hard Truths Government response, Progress update), and the row carries the Progress update cell. No column says which organisation wrote an update, so the row is filed under the Department of Health (now the Department of Health and Social Care), which published it.
Site note: The Inquiry addressed this recommendation to the Care Quality Commission, not to the Department of Health. The annex gives this update in the Department's publication and does not say who wrote it, so the row is the Department's report of the progress made on it.
What other bodies have found
In their own words. These do not change the delivery statement above.
Thirlwall Inquiry legal team (15 May 2024)
This recommendation was accepted by the Government.
In the January 2014 Hard Truths report, the Government referred to the Care Quality Commission already having a customer service centre which received comments from the public, and that it ensured these comments were fed into inspections. The Government said that no legal obstacles to the Care Quality Commission accessing information had been identified and any bureaucratic obstacles to information sharing were being addressed through the development of information sharing protocols.
The Care Quality Commission published its ‘Complaints Matter’ report in December 2014. It set out its ‘Intelligent Monitoring’ process, which used various indicators including negative patient comments, complaints received by the Care Quality Commission and provider complaints. Information relating to complaints from providers would include numbers of complaints, their themes and timeliness of resolution. The Care Quality Commission also set out the contact before site inspections its local inspections team would make, in order to find out more about concerns and complaints and how these are handled. During the site visit, the member of staff with responsibility for complaints would be interviewed.
Site note: The Thirlwall Inquiry legal team's own notes on implementation, from its Review of Implementation of Recommendations from Previous Inquiries into Healthcare Issues (version of 15 May 2024). The review does not colour its Extent of Implementation cell for this recommendation green; it leaves the cell uncoloured where a recommendation was rejected, where evidence of implementation was insufficient, or where steps had been taken but implementation was not yet complete. Table row: section 16.2 No. 38, PDF page 406-407.
Source
Responsible bodies
Themes and tags
Who has spoken
- Department of Health and Social Care
Response, delivery statement - DHSC and NHS England
Delivery statement - Thirlwall Inquiry legal team
Finding