The Caring KLOE is the shortest of all key lines of enquiry, but arguably the one with most impact on the patients and their families/carers. It’s also the one where no practice will ever feel they fall short of 100% compliance. Experience leads those involved in inspections to recognise that a culture of caring is…

Practices need to be responsive to patient needs – both individual and collective – something that I’ll focus on in this article. A good question to start with is ‘are your policies designed to be responsive to patients with special needs, especially under Equality legislation?’ The Key Line of Enquiry (KLOE) includes some very direct…

Continuing our focus on CQC inspections and the key lines of enquiry (KLOEs), in this article we concentrate on the ‘effective’ element. The effective KLOE is all about being good at showing how the practice employs evidence-based outcomes that enable patients to experience a good quality of life. There’s also an underlying theme of making…

The Safety KLOE has arguably undergone the most change in the new inspection regime – and more than likely reflects the results from the first round of inspections where safety issues were not found to be either well-applied or consistent. Safety here applies to patients and service users and as would be expected, the issues…

In part two of our series looking at CQC inspection key lines of enquiries (KLOEs), we looked generally at the KLOE that deals with Practice Leadership. While the PM may not necessarily be the leader, there is a great deal of leadership work that falls to most of us. Casting minds back to 2004 and…

Leadership is defined in many ways. The Oxford Dictionary is little help as it merely says, “The action of leading a group of people or an organisation,” while Forbes defines it as being, “a process of social influence, which maximises the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal”. One of the most influential…

By now, it’s safe to assume that all practice managers know what a KLOE is. However, when it comes to dealing with the CQC, the real test is whether what you believe it means corresponds with what your CQC Inspection Team believes it is. From experience, the gap between the two can be a significant…