Archived: Ribbleton Hospital

All the people we spoke with said they were happy with the care provided. The expert by experience spoke with three family members who told us, "Her care has been excellent, I have been involved with the care plan and attended meetings. The doctor explains everything. We are both treated with great dignity", "We have little experience as my aunt was only admitted just over a week ago. They have been quite informative and phoned me a couple of times about her care. We are here for a CPA meeting" and "Staff could be more informative, but they have phoned up when there have been problems. His discharge arrangements have been discussed and I have been invited to meetings, but transport problems make this impractical. The service is quite good as a whole". Relatives were kept up to date with the care and support of their family member cared for on this ward.

We found staff were supported in their responsibilities to be able to deliver care and treatment to the patients. We spoke with three staff about being supported in their work. All of the staff we spoke with said they felt supported by the ward managers, modern matron and each other.

There were systems in place to monitor the quality and safety of the service. We found the trust had implemented improvements to the ward.

Patients were not protected from the risks of inadequate nutrition and dehydration because staff had not received training on how to use the Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST) that the Trust had in place.

One patient told us the, 'Food is very good; best I have had in this sort of place'. Another patient told us that the food was freshly cooked.

We found that people who used the hospital felt safe and we found that staff had received some training on safeguarding adults and had computerised access to appropriate policies and procedures.

Members of staff were not being adequately supported by management through an organised system of supervision and training.

An effective system for assessing and monitoring the quality of the service provided at the hospital had not been sufficiently developed in order to ensure that people received safe and appropriate care.