WIREDGOV

With the EU referendum approaching, you may have heard about public bodies, like CQC, having to respect a ‘pre-referendum period’, which places certain short-term restrictions on what we’re allowed to publish and announce in the period before referendums.

As a non-departmental public body, we also have a duty to be politically impartial – it is important that our conduct during the pre-referendum period, and at all times, does not call this into question.

We have been informed that the pre-referendum period will begin on 27 May 2016 and end on the 23 June 2016 for the referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union or not.

While we will not be publishing new national reports during this time, we want to be clear that this will not affect our activities that we class as ‘business as usual’.

As the regulator of health and adult social care, our role is to monitor, inspect, and regulate services to make sure people receive safe, high-quality and compassionate care and to encourage improvement. This will continue.

This means we will continue to carry out inspections of health and adult social care services across the country, including planned and follow-up inspections, as well as those that are in response to concerns. Also, we will continue to take enforcement actions against providers that are not delivering the care that we expect from them and that people deserve.

We will continue to publish our findings and judgements of services in our inspections reports, including our ratings of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate so that providers and the public have clear information about the performance of their local services and providers can make the necessary improvements.

For example, while we can’t confirm the exact dates just yet, we expect to publish judgements and reports on the following NHS trusts reports during or around the pre-EU referendum period:

• Airedale NHS Foundation Trust
• Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
• Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust
• Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
• Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare NHS Trust
• Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust
• Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust
• Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust
• South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust
• South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust
• South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
• Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
• The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (CHS)
• University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust
• Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Similarly, we will continue to publish inspection reports and judgements of adult social care and primary medical care services across the country throughout this period.

All of our inspection reports and judgements will be publicised in the normal way, including on our website and to the media, and we will continue to talk about the full range of our work, such as at events and in our blogs.

Further information on what this period means for public bodies is available on the Cabinet Office’s website.