As we head towards further industrial action from junior doctors in April, I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the amount of work leaders and colleagues across the NHS are doing to mitigate the risk that this poses.
We recognise that it is not just on the days that industrial action takes place that colleagues will be under increased pressure, and we see the huge amount of work already taking place to plan for absences, potential delays or appointment cancellations, and much more, in the hope that patients experience as little disruption as possible and are kept safe.
These are incredibly difficult circumstances to work in. I encourage any colleagues who are concerned about how they will care for patients safely because of the impact of the industrial action to talk to their CQC inspection teams as soon as possible. Our focus as the regulator is always on keeping people safe, but we also want to support leaders and staff across the NHS to do this.
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In January 2023, we published our response to winter pressures. This involved adjusting our regulatory activity until the end of March 2023.
We’ve now published our plans from 1 April 2023. You’ll find the full update on our website.
For acute, independent and mental health services, we'll:
- Respond to new and emerging information of concern in NHS organisations, including inspecting core services and the well-led key question. This includes NHS acute hospitals, ambulance, community health and NHS 111 services. We’ll also prioritise services with inherent risk including unrated locations and locations we haven’t yet inspected.
- Continue to inspect mental health services and independent health providers, and carry out Mental Health Act (MHA) monitoring visits as planned.
- Continue our national programme of inspections in maternity services.
Across all sectors we'll prioritise inspections of services for people with a learning disability and autistic people where we've not received updated information in the last 12 months or we haven't inspected for 3 or more years.
We'll continue to develop the next steps in delivering our strategy. This includes our approach to local authority and integrated care system assessments, which we published recently. We’ll share an update on implementing our new regulatory approach in the coming weeks.
 In a new blog Chris Dzikiti, Director of Mental Health, discusses a new programme of work aimed at observing the culture in high-risk mental health services. The work uses observation as the primary method to try and understand the mood, the level of engagement with people using services, and the quality of their interactions with staff on wards identified as at risk of developing a closed culture.
We're currently testing this approach and will be rolling out a full inspection programme later in the year. Sign up to Citizenlab to be the first to get updates on how the testing phase went and opportunities to share your views.
 The provider portal is the best way to submit requests for a Second Opinion Appointed Doctor (SOAD) request. It allows you to submit requests for a SOAD as well as other notifications. Parts of the form are automatically populated using the information we already hold, saving you time. You can save the form as you progress through it and come back to the form later if you need to. You can also share with others who have access, who can see which forms you have submitted and download a copy.
To find out more please visit our website or to request access email enquiries@cqc.org.uk or call 03000 616161 (select option 3).
 We’ll shortly be updating our guidance on the adult trans care pathway and need your help.
We're currently looking for examples of good practice of providing care to trans people on the trans care pathway, outside of specialised gender dysphoria clinics, specifically in the following areas: maternity and gynaecology, speech and language therapy and GP services.
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