The UK Government’s new health and social care regulator is to draft a risk profile for every GP practice so that it can identify poor or possibly dangerous GPs, according to the journal Pulse.

The Care Quality Commission, which takes on regulatory responsibility on 1 April, plans to evaluate practices using a risk tool based on a series of indicators of substandard performance.

Risk scores would be based on a range of data, including total numbers of complaints, surveys of staff and patients and the commission’s inspections of GP practices.

The CQC will have access to other data, such as primary care trust ratings of practices and prescribing and referral patterns.

Baroness Young, chair of the CQC, told Pulse that risk profiling would allow the commission to build up a comprehensive picture of the quality of general practice, as a first step to taking regulatory action where necessary.

Baroness Young said: “Of all the elements of the healthcare system, primary care is the one with least information for patients and least assurance on the quality of services. What we’ll develop is a risk profile. Over time we’ll get to know the indicators of highest risk – what the things are that would make you think a service might have problems or be a risk to patients. In any regulated service, there will always be a few folk who are not up to it. There will always be a few who are mad, bad and dangerous to know, but I hope that will be a minority. We’ll be able to spot risk with greater accuracy and work with those poor providers to help them improve. Or if they won’t – if they’re really providing very poor services – we’ll take regulatory action and enforcement.”

Young said enforcement powers at the CQC’s disposal would include making GPs work under special measures or even withdrawing their registration ‘as a last resort’.

A spokesperson for CQC said: ‘We will use an array of NHS numeric data sets. There is considerable expertise within the CQC’s ranks in assessment of risk, and we will build on the Healthcare Commission’s history of working with academic departments.’

Professor John Appleby, chief economist at the King’s Fund, believes it will be hard to get a definitive picture of GPs’performance via a risk-profiling system. ‘How do you reach an opinion on quality when GPs seem good at some things but not so good at others?’ he said.

Richard Hoey, deputy editor of Pulse, said: ‘Presumably under these plans high-risk practices would face regular inspections, while those that were performing well would get a more light-touch approach. “It’s an interesting idea, but there are risks to this kind of approach depending on what kinds of factor you flag up as markers of concern. You could leave some GPs feeling unfairly victimised and others practising overly defensively, which would be no good for patients or the NHS.”

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Edited and complied by Christian Nordqvist