CQC's inspection programme of Defence Medical Services: Annual report for 2024/25 (Year 8)
Summary of inspection activity in 2024/25
During 2024/25 – Year 8 of this programme – we carried out 34 comprehensive inspections, comprising:
- 20 medical centres (including primary care rehabilitation facilities with expertise input from DMS physiotherapy and exercise rehabilitation specialist advisors)
- 14 dental centres.
We also carried out 14 follow-up inspections to ensure that services have resolved the concerns we found on initial inspections. We re-inspected:
- 9 medical centres (including primary care rehabilitation facilities with input from DMS physiotherapy and exercise rehabilitation specialist advisors)
- 3 dental centres
- 1 pre-hospital emergency care (PHEC) service
- 1 military department of community mental health.
Most services have been able to deliver some improvements, although there are still barriers to improvement in some areas, specifically:
- insufficient leadership capacity
- lack of a clinical information system to provide a comprehensive set of performance indicators
- poor infrastructure
- gaps in training.
In our inspection reports, we continued to highlight exemplary practice to encourage other services to learn from it and to adapt what is relevant to use in their own improvement journey.
All inspection reports for Defence Medical Services are available on our website.