According to a health watchdog, the needed standards of safety and quality are not being met by more than one in four health and social care providers as they fail to do so.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) said that for making 27 per cent of the locations that were inspected by the CQC action had to be taken.

In England there were inspection of about 14,000 health and social care providers and the CQC report that was made based on these inspections that were unannounced and CQC said it had to instruct 3,687 organisations to improve services.

There were some cases in which complete services had to be ended while improvement plans were given to others.

The CQC said, “About 77 per cent of NHS services were providing the essential standards, compared to 72 per cent locations in adult social care and 82 per cent in independent healthcare. The key problems found upon inspection were the mismanagement of medicines, staffing numbers and record keeping.”

The needed standards of medicine management were not even met by almost two in five locations.