Your leaflet on standards in NHS hospitals

What can you expect from your hospital?

Following the introduction of a new law, there’s a new quango in town. All NHS hospitals in England must now be licensed by the the new health and social care regulator for England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The CQC has published a new leaflet What standards to expect from the regulation of your NHS hospital which tells you what any decent hospital should offer.

The CQC says it will ‘continuously monitor’ hospitals to make sure they are meeting new essential standards of quality and safety. The CQC website also includes an up-to-date directory of all licensed NHS hospitals. You can now look up the current status of any NHS hospital trust in England.

Your experiences

The CQC also want to hear about your hospital experiences, good and bad.

The licensing of NHS hospitals is, as the CQC put it, ‘just the first step in a programme which will see new essential standards of quality and safety gradually rolled out across all health and adult social care services in England’. Adult social care services must also be licensed by CQC.