The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 272 No 7290 p309
13 March 2004

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CHI failed to deliver what ministers expected

The Commission for Health Improvement, which is to be replaced by the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection next month, was a victim of tension between the role it was given by legislation and the expectations of ministers, a new report reveals.

The report, sponsored by the King’s Fund, says that legislation set CHI the task of reporting on the effectiveness of NHS trusts’ clinical governance arrangements. But ministers expected it to report on the quality of trust services. Although the report compliments CHI on setting up a reporting system from scratch and achieving its target of inspecting all trusts on a four-year cycle, it criticises the substance of the inspection and reporting system used. It suggests that the inspection framework concentrated too heavily on defining quality rather than on understanding how organisations achieve it.