Suffolk: There was a huge amount of work involved

• Prepare your staff and senior management team for what is to come
• Dedicated team needed to oversee process, but as director you have to retain oversight
• Evidence gathering is huge amount of work – Suffolk identified more than 500 different pieces of evidence before narrowing it down. 

Suffolk County Council was a late addition to the pilot scheme when the call came again in early summer Director of Adult and Community Services Georgia Chimbani put her hand up. “We thought why not, we are always striving to improve and this seemed a good way to test ourselves.”

Within two days of being approved by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in early June, the council was sent a list of evidence they needed to provide for the evidence gathering part of the process.

A project team was immediately set up, composed of Ms Chimbani, two assistant directors, the head of adult safeguarding, head of insight and intelligence, two programme managers, the principal social worker and business support, and the work began compiling the evidence that was needed.

There were 48 different categories of evidence that needed to be supplied. This ranged from a self-assessment, feedback from staff, complaints, arrangements for care funding and commissioning strategies.

Ms Chimbani said Suffolk was fortunate in many respects to have gone through a peer review process at the start of 2023. “It meant we could rely heavily on it for the self-assessment we submitted. Without that, I don’t know what we would have done. It would have been daunting starting from scratch.

“But there was still a huge amount of evidence to collect – and not all of it was self-explanatory,” said Ms Chimbani. 

Some were open to interpretation. I think the CQC perhaps need a bit of narrative explaining what they are wanting to achieve.

“We had two weeks to get it ready but were able to ask for a two-week extension. We started off with something like 550 separate pieces of evidence, but recognised we had to narrow it down.” 

In the end, Suffolk submitted 325 alongside the 50 case reports.

The field inspection was carried out in early September over the course of three days. It ran smoothly, said Ms Chimbani, but only after a lot of preparation work.

A range of people were interviewed, including frontline social workers, senior managers, chair of the health and wellbeing board. Some were done on site and some were done remotely on Zoom. The CQC team visited staff in locations they worked, including workers in the north of the county and those working in one of the county hospitals.

Firstly, there was a great deal of liaising with the CQC about what who they wanted to interview and when, Ms Chimbani said. “We did not always recognise the roles they were asking for. Not every role is the same in each area so with some of the requests we had to go back and forth clarifying whether we had identified the right person for what they wanted.

Secondly, there was a lot of work done preparing those who were interviewed for the CQC visit. “You have to socialise the rest of the council,” said Ms Chimbani.

I kept the corporate management team and members briefed. Some of the frontline staff were very worried about the prospect of being interviewed by the CQC so we worked with Partners in Health and Care to do some workshops with those we knew were going to take part. It helped build up their confidence as many staff have never been interviewed by CQC before.

Ms Chimbani said careful thought needs to be given to how the assurance process is going to be managed.

The project team racked up more than 1,000 hours over a three-month period – and that does not include requests they made on the wider team for information and interviews. They were working full time on it – there was only time to deal with very urgent things in their day job.

“It meant work had to be delegated. I’m not sure how sustainable that is and I think that will change going forward, it will probably be streamlined by the CQC. But I would expect it will still surprise many just how much work is involved.

“Uploading the information was really time-consuming too, probably more than it should have been – and we have fed this back to the CQC. They were not able to lift information direct from our website or intranet, which meant we had to manually download and upload the information and the CQC portal was pretty clunky.”

To help manage the process, Ms Chimbani ensured there were regular weekly meetings. “On Monday there would be a meeting with the wider social care leadership team where we briefed them on key activity for that week and any asks of them.

“At the end of the week the core project group would meet and they would spend more time on the minutiae. As director, you have to take ownership of the process, as it is easy for important aspects of the process to be overlooked.”