CQC Assured

Adam O'Donnell

Senior CQC Compliance Specialist

Adam supports GP practices across Kingston and Richmond by providing advice on governance and CQC compliance issues. He also helps practices prepare for CQC inspections including practice visits and mock inspections, as well as leading on governance and compliance issues for KGPC services.

Amar Gandavadi

CQC Compliance Specialist

Amar supports GP practices across Kingston and Richmond by providing advice on governance and CQC compliance issues. He also helps practices prepare for CQC inspections including practice visits and mock inspections, as well as supporting on governance and compliance issues for KGPC services.

CQC Assured is our dedicated CQC support service

The service is run by former CQC inspectors, Adam O’Donnell and Amar Gandavadi. The service offers training courses, mock inspections, template documents and pre/post inspection support.

The service is fully funded for all Kingston practices.

For more information and to access resources, visit the CQC Assured website. You will need an account to access the member zone, which can be requested by sending an email to: cqcassured@nhs.net.

Reasonable Adjustments Flag

The Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag is a national record which indicates that reasonable adjustments are required for an individual and optionally includes details of their significant impairments, key adjustments that should be considered, and underlying conditions.

Compliance and implementation of the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag Information Standard is by a two-phased approach and organisations should be working towards compliance with phase one by no later than April 2024. Please refer to this link for more details of actions required and how to achieve compliance.

NHS England has built the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag in the NHS Spine to enable health and care professionals to record, share and view details of reasonable adjustments across the NHS, wherever the person is treated.

In September 2023, a Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag Information Standard was published (under section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012) that details what all NHS and social care organisations in England are required to do about the flag.

Please see below resources to support GP practices to be compliant when using their clinical systems to record reasonable adjustments locally:

RAF Toolkit – developed by Cumbria ICB this contains guidance as well as a template and ‘search and reports’ that can be imported and used directly into EMIS

RAF guidance document – this includes details the templates available to those practices using Ardens.

RAF guidance Video – developed by Annie Murphy

All available on the GPIT page on GP Teamnet - https://teamnet.clarity.co.uk/Topics/ViewItem/412292e7-3a01-440d-bef1-ab9d00a2dbe0/6703

Primary Care IT :

For those practices using the Primary Care IT service, the team have confirmed that they have been working closely with the national lead on this and have built a suite of resources which are being released to aid practices with recording of the reasonable adjustment flags. This includes patient status alerts and protocol alerts (for S1 and EMIS respectively) that identify where there are other codes used that may indicate a reasonable adjustment (but this is not yet recorded using the nationally specified codes). Also, they’ve built flags into the templates for all user groups that highlight the same. They’ve also built the same into the Referral Tree so that there is consistency of coding used when making referrals.

Ensure you identify the patients that require a reasonable adjustment flag, obtain consent from them before you add a reasonable adjustment flag to their record. Once a patient who requires a reasonable adjustment flag has been identified, the below codes should be used.

Essential codes (must be added):

1. Impairment with substantial and long-term adverse effect on normal day to day activity (Equality Act (2010) 1326341000000105

2. Requires reasonable adjustment for health and care access (Equality Act 2010) 1108111000000107

3. consent code:

• Consent given to upload data to Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag (finding) 1853771000000105

• Declined consent to upload data to Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag (finding) 1853781000000107