Bye tech
Care Quality Commission , Issue 1634 AFTER diverting millions from frontline operations to invest in an overambitious, malfunctioning, high-tech IT system, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has finally admitted defeat and gone into full reverse-ferret mode.

The health regulator, recently deemed unfit for purpose by health secretary Wes Streeting, has quietly mothballed its system and returned to emails and Microsoft tools. It remains coy about just how much the vanity scheme of hastily departed chief executive Ian Trenholm had cost, but freedom of information requests suggest a figure well north of £50m.

Big spender
This is only the latest in Trenholm's IT graveyard of taxpayer-funded failures at public departments and bodies, whose total value approaches half a billion pounds (Eye 1630), excluding his own nearly £2m in wages and pension payments.

Trenholm, an ex-copper, "had this fantasy of us all working in this high-energy, buzzing, shiny control centre with live updates on screens", a CQC insider told the Eye. "That's not how we work. Our systems needed updating, which might have cost a few quid. This was a £50m iceberg. We could all see it, we all said it, yet the board let him steer us right into it. Those that did need to be held accountable."

Trenholm's equally flawed Single Assessment Framework, aimed at reducing workloads by amalgamating specialist directorates – thus ditching a decade of expertise – and inspecting "low risk" providers remotely, has also been largely dismantled.

Sick notes
Another insider said: "It's taken one man six years to shred the very fabric of the body that exists to ensure our health and social care providers are operating safely. It could take just as long to get it running properly again. In the meantime, we are all sick to the stomach when we read inquests and inquiries into the human cost of failed services."

As backlogs mount, interim executives have written to experienced inspectors lost in the cull and subsequent resignations, begging them to come back. But with staff vacancies at 12 percent, compared to the 5 percent maximum target, catching up will take time.

More than 16,500 new providers have been waiting more than a year for their first inspection. Of the CQC's annual target of 16,000 inspections this year, latest board meeting papers show an average of just 265 per month since April.

Dashed hopes
The organisation is braced for another battering when the final report of the Dash Inquiry into the CQC performance is published this autumn.

Dr Penny Dash was so alarmed by her initial findings that she released an interim report in July, which prompted urgent backpedalling from the CQC after months and years of assuring staff, health providers and government ministers that the new systems were merely bedding in.