Regulator apologises to 60 general practices for wrongly prioritising them for inspection

England’s healthcare regulator has apologised to 60 general practices that it singled out as being a high priority for inspection and has admitted that they do not need to be urgently reviewed. But the BMA said the mix-up showed that the system that ranks practices is not fit for purpose and should be scrapped.

In November the Care Quality Commission (CQC) launched its system of “intelligent monitoring” to rank general practices in one of six bands, to help it decide which surgeries should undergo its new inspection regime first.1 At the time 120 of 7661 practices in England were ranked in bands …