The CQC inspected the Trust from 5th December 2017 to 18th January 2018 and they have today published their report on the services inspected.
The CQC inspected five core services at Russells Hall Hospital and community adult services including sexual health services.
Diane Wake, Chief Executive said, “It is pleasing to see the inspectors found our services to be caring overall, rating the care given as good; however, disappointing that our Trust rating remains requires improvement.
“We are particularly disappointed that our Emergency Department has been rated inadequate, especially given how hard our staff have worked in very challenging times.
“We absolutely recognise there is work to do to ensure our services are the best they can be for our patients and we are supporting our staff to make the improvements we need to ensure safe, effective, responsive and well-led services.
“Our Emergency Department has an improvement plan in place which will support the staff to deliver the safe quality care they all aspire to. One of the key areas for improvement highlighted was the need to ensure patients in the department are triaged in a timely manner, and that staff do this consistently and in line with the guidance.
“We have taken immediate actions with our Emergency Department to ensure patients are safe in our care, including additional training in triage processes for all staff, extra support for our resus team in the department and daily audits of the care of deteriorating patients to make sure standards are maintained.
“The CQC also had concerns about the use of temporary staffing to fill gaps in our staffing establishment. This is an issue we are working hard to address and have had success in our recruitment and retention drive over the last twelve months as we strive to recruit our own staff.
“We are very proud of our community services whose overall rating was good, and the team found examples of outstanding practice. In particular, the innovative multi -disciplinary working to provide good care to patients. Compassionate care was obvious to the team and the feedback from patients confirmed this.
“We are really pleased with the improvements in Maternity Services which mean they have been rated good overall. Our medical care, including how we care for older people also remains good with a stroke service that is one of the best in the region.
“Our staff are committed to making all of the improvements necessary on our journey to become outstanding.
“The inspectors could see there had been improvements in the incident reporting process since their last inspection and that staff could demonstrate learning. They also received excellent feedback about how the team have tailored services to meet the needs of individuals and processes in place to keep patients safe.”
The full report is available here.
