CQC Statutory Notifications: What You Must Report, and How Fast You Must Report It Key Takeaways • • • • •
A statutory notification is a legal duty, not good practice you can schedule around, missing one is a criminal offence Certain events, deaths, serious injury, abuse allegations, police involvement, must be notified "without delay" Registered manager absences of 28 days or more have specific, separate deadlines Delegating who submits a notification doesn't remove the registered person's accountability for it A missed notification is rarely judged in isolation, it raises a wider question about governance
A single missed notification can do more damage to a service's reputation with CQC than the incident it was meant to report. That sounds backwards until you understand what CQC is actually looking for when it finds a gap: not just what happened, but why it was never told, and what that says about whether the service can be trusted to self-report at all. Statutory notifications are one of the few parts of CQC compliance with a hard legal deadline attached. Most of what makes up good compliance, audits, policy reviews, staff training, is work you control the pace of. Notifications aren't. For some of them, the clock starts the moment the event happens, and getting it wrong turns a single incident into two separate problems.
What Is a CQC Statutory Notification? A statutory notification is a formal report a registered provider is legally required to send to CQC when a specific event occurs at their service. The duty comes from the Care Quality Commission (Registration) Regulations 2009, the same regulations that govern registration itself and the statement of purpose every provider submits. Regulation 18, "notification of other incidents," is the one that catches most providers out. It requires the registered person to notify CQC without delay of a defined list of events, and it's