- Independent mental health service
Broomhill
Report from 28 October 2024 assessment
Contents
Ratings - Long stay or rehabilitation mental health wards for working age adults
Our view of the service
Broomhill hospital Northampton provides care, treatment, and support to individuals with mental health concerns. Broomhill is part of St. Matthews Limited, which consists of four care homes and four hospital locations in Northampton and Coventry. Broomhill provides 99 beds across 2 core services and 7 wards. Acute wards for adults of working age, consists of one ward. Long stay rehabilitation for adults of working age consists of 6 wards. At the time of this assessment the acute ward and one of the long stay rehabilitation wards was closed. There were a total of 43 patients at the hospital. This assessment looked at the remaining 5 long stay rehabilitation wards known as Althorp, Cottesbrooke, Kelmarsh, Lamport and Spencer wards. At our last inspection the service was rated inadequate in all key questions; inadequate overall, and was placed in special measures. This assessment was focussed on the breaches that gave rise to the previous ratings as required under special measures monitoring. We looked at 22 Quality Statements across all 5 Key Questions. At this assessment we saw how staff and managers had worked hard to improve the quality of their care and had engaged well with the Local Authority, ICB and CQC to bring about required changes. Although the provider had implemented actions and submitted action plans that addressed all of the concerns we had previously found, many of the actions had taken a long time to be implemented, and therefore had not had time to become embedded in practice. Senior managers told us that they recognised that embedding plans into practice was ongoing and if we were to go back in a years’ time we would find a very different situation. We found the provider had made sufficient improvements to improve their overall rating. However, we identified breaches under Regulations 9 , 12 and 17. Additionally, the Effective key question remains Inadequate. Therefore the service will remain in special measures.
People's experience of this service
We spoke with 8 patients across the five wards. Patients told us they felt safe at this hospital. Most patients spoke positively about the staff and told us they treated them with kindness and compassion. Some patients said there were still some issues that needed to be addressed. One patient told us they had waited 3 weeks to see a doctor. Another patient said that their needs were not always listened to by staff and accessing the multi-disciplinary team could be difficult. One patient said that the ward they were on had been short staffed on occasion, which meant that morning meetings had to be cancelled and escorted leave postponed. One patient reported they had seen some staff on their mobile phones. Some patients told us that the internet connectivity at the hospital could be problematic which they found frustrating as they used this to keep in touch with family members. Patients were still not happy with the catering and menu choice. We were told food could be uncooked, tasteless, and unhealthy. One patient said they went hungry rather than eat what was on offer. While we were told that there was enough staff on the wards to meet patient’s needs now, we were aware that there were only 42 out of 99 patients in the hospital with full staffing. We was not assured that this would have been the same response if the hospital had been full with 99 patients, and we require action plans to address these concerns.