Registered managers are required to be named and registered, by organisations, with the CQC since 1 October 2011.
The registered manager is registered with the CQC to be the day-to-day manager and shares the responsibility for compliance with the regulations.
If practices do not have a registered manager they may be provided with a fixed penalty notice of £4,000, increasing to £50,000 and potentially jail if the penalty is not paid.
Carol Oram, commercial director at Dental Health Spa in Brighton, received such a penalty: ‘In January this year we received an email with three notices.
‘After putting our application in back in 2011 we hadn’t heard anything and assumed it had all gone through.
‘We’re not a big corporate, we’re not doing anything deliberate or underhand, it’s purely an admin error and we’re not trying to avoid any fees because there isn’t a fee to pay for having a registered manager.’
The penalty at Dental Health Spa was given without any warning or notice to rectify the error.
With the CQC cracking down on registered managers, it is advised that dental practices register a manager straight away and check all the small print in the CQC regulations to avoid any future unexpected hefty penalties.