And so, in they came and away they went and we’re still here and moving along to another day.
Our CQC inspectors arrived 30 minutes early on Wednesday the 5th of May and so the process began.
I offered to show them round but we were quite sure they wouldn’t let me and would want someone else to do that but they didn’t and were delighted to be shown round by me and to hear me waffle on about the tales of building the practice and why we did it.
That certainly made me feel a whole lot better about the process and being able to just put across my thoughts about why we were here.
It’s one thing though thinking that you’ve done a good thing and built it properly and specially and tried to make it honest and the best you can, it’s another thing to seek external validation from people whom you’ve never met before, whose job it is to test that theory.
Two inspectors arrived, one who was clearly compliance based and one clinical and the next thing I was in my office talking to the clinical inspector about case notes and being asked (very nicely and calmly and kindly) to demonstrate points from case notes of different types of treatments to ensure that we were meeting standards.
It was at that point exactly that I realised that almost all the aspects of everything to do with this inspection were nothing to do with me.
A real lightbulb moment.
All of the stuff that I’ve read about leadership styles and all of the training I’ve done and the books I’ve scoured through and the videos I’ve watched, to try to help formulate what I felt was the best way to set-up the business that I would like to have, pretty much came down right to that needle point.
As I was chatting to the clinical inspector I said “it really would be much better if Louise were to show you this (my clinical lead)”.
The clinical inspector was delighted for me to pass that over and I explained that I felt it was a whole lot better if I was able to demonstrate to the inspectors how brilliant and capable my team are, instead of me fumbling through things that really aren’t in my department.
And so, I passed Louise on to the clinical inspector and they went into one of the treatment rooms, onto a proper computer (and off the Mac I was trying to use) and I went to see some patients for new implant consultations, which is in fact my job.
About 40 minutes later I checked in to make sure they were ok and they had, in fact, finished that entire checklist with non problems whatsoever and got onto something else.
Every time I finished a new patient (about once an hour) I popped into the board room where the inspectors were to answer any questions they might have which I was best placed to deal with.
At any point that I wasn’t best placed to deal with the questions I delegated them to someone else whose much better placed than me, which might have been Louise (my clinical lead) or Lucy who runs the IPC (sterilisation) or Kath who runs the audits.
In the end I came into the board room for another round of possible questions to find Hayley speaking to the lead compliance inspector about box-sets on Netflix and hearing stories about some of the practices they had inspected.
Round about that point, I realised that I was only answering questions because I was available and when Angela started to answer questions on the sedation aspects of the service, I realised that pretty much anybody in the business could be answering the questions that I was being asked to answer.
Please don’t misunderstand this, it’s not that I am in anyway upset or disappointed by the fact that I am surplus to requirements, after all the videos and book and hours as above that’s exactly what I’d hoped to be.
The lead compliance inspector asked at one point whether it would be ok for his manager to come to look round and to see what we are doing. So much was he impressed with the setup that we have and in particular how we had been able to teach DFT’s between lockdown 1 and 2.
But I suppose the final cherry on the top (and not for me in any way but for Hayley and for our team) was when they suggested that they might like to invite Hayley to be a CQC inspector just before they finished up.
Whilst the report is yet to be published and we are to have sight of it, we’re told that there is nothing (that means nothing) on the report.
After all the checklists and box ticks and handstands and star jumps, we weren’t missing anything.
They found 5 points of advice, one of which was suggesting that we might hang our mops in the other direction but none of that would appear on the report.
We had as a team (not I, but us) decided we would try our best to aim for an ‘outstanding Ofsted’.
It would appear that we were successful in that regard.
Make no mistake though, while every single person in our building (and I think there are 41 now) made a significant role in what happened today. It was conducted entirely at the front by Hayley Brown.
This is entirely her triumph, because she invented the people who helped her to do it and she carried the responsibility entirely for what was happening, so much so that even to write this blog is to produce utter fraud to seem to take any credit whatsoever in what is the most outstanding achievement.
Hayley knows what I think about that and would not thank me for writing it here.
Blog Post Number - 2725