Talk to CQC about the health and/or social care you receive and you could win a £300 Love2Shop voucher *NOW CLOSED*

It is very hard to feed back about care when you are leaving your loved on in a vulnerable place, with few options available to them. Where can you go? Only a few gatekeepers can access that power and can make life very difficult and unpleasant for those using it. You also have the feeling of helplessness that, those you feedback to would have no position to empower change, so there is little point in starting the process.

One small example from the Grant Thornton report in August 2012. Chief executive David Behan commissioned a report by management consultants Grant Thornton. The report examined the CQC's response to complaints about baby and maternal deaths and injuries at Furness General Hospital in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria and was instigated by a complaint from a member of the public and "an allegation of a "cover-up" submitted by a whistleblower at CQC. It was published on 19 June 2013.

Among the findings, the CQC was "accused of quashing an internal review that uncovered weaknesses in its processes" and had allegedly "deleted the review of their failure to act on concerns about University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust. One CQC employee claimed that he was instructed by a senior manager "to destroy his review because it would expose the regulator to public criticism. The report concluded: "We think that the information contained in the [deleted] report was sufficiently important that the deliberate failure to provide it could properly be characterised as a 'cover-up'. David Prior, who joined the commission as chairman in January 2013, responded that the organisation's previous management had been "totally dysfunctional" and admitted that the organisation was "not fit for purpose".

It still isn't.

It's obviously a cheap way of them getting information, RAF.
I feel sorry for the CQC in a way, as they have had cuts along with the rest of government departments. It's like HMRC being reprimanded for not doing enough to stop tax fraud while at the same time having their offices closed and employees made redundant.
CQC seem to be given more and more to do, with less resources.

I'm afraid I can't say I approve of £300 of taxpayers money being spent in this way. GP leaders have voted for the CQC to be decommissioned and the money be reinvested in frontline services.

The near-unanimous vote at the LMCs Conference saw GPs sharing their experiences of the CQC’s inspection process, which was described as ‘incompetent and bullying’.

I gave the CQC feedback about my mother's care in a care home. We went through the whole complaints procedure for over a year.
At the final meeting, we were told that the CQC had stopped the complaint about the home six months earlier, and since then our complaint had been about the CQC's handling of the complaint.
This was news to us.
We then wrote to two MPs, Alan Johnson, who was MP for the area that the home was in, and John Prescott, who was MP for my sister, and the home where my mother died.
Neither of them even had the decency to reply.

Wry smile at the idea of the CQC wanting us to share our experiences of care.