The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published a report following an inspection of child and adolescent mental health (CAMHS) wards at the Beacon Centre, part of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust.
CQC carried out an unannounced focused inspection of the Beacon Centre in April and May to follow up on improvements made after a focused inspection in October 2020.
Following the inspection, the overall rating of the CAMHS services has moved up from requires improvement to good. The rating for how safe the service is has also moved up, from inadequate to good. The rating for how effective and how well led the services is has moved from requires improvement to good. Caring remains as good. The trust’s overall rating is good.
The Beacon Centre is a 16-bed mixed gender inpatient child and adolescent mental health (CAMHS) unit for young people aged between 13 – 18 years old. The service cares for people with a range of mental health disorders when their needs cannot be safely met in the community.
Jane Ray, CQC’s head of hospital inspection for mental health in London, said:
“During our inspection of the Beacon Centre, we found a number of improvements had been made.
“Inspectors met a new leadership team who were passionate about their work and committed to the improvement of the service with a very clear vision of how to continue to ensure recent improvements are sustained.
“Staff were found to be better at managing patient risk and now focused on taking the least restrictive way to intervene when managing incidents of violence and aggression. They considered each patient’s needs and used a tailored approach to de-escalate the situation.
“There were still areas for improvement, including the trust needing to continue its focus on how the team could learn from incidents.”
Inspectors found:
- Progress had been made with recruitment of registered nurses despite ongoing nurse recruitment challenges across the sector. This meant that patients were now starting to receive consistent care from staff they were familiar with
- Staff were better aware of how to manage individual patient risk and inspectors observed thorough discussions about patient risk on the ward where all staff contributed
- Staff could now access regular supervision
- Specialist training was available to staff and helped provide them with the skills they needed to support the patient group
- Improvements had been made to the way records were kept when patients refused their medication. This meant that all staff were now aware of when patients had refused medication.
However, inspectors also found:
- Leaders were aware that the staff group remained anxious and that there was tension around feeling heavily scrutinised. They recognised that a key priority going forward was to move the focus on from immediate improvement, and instead embed a supportive, business as usual atmosphere, in which staff felt more supported
- Staff still needed to ensure liquid medicines were dated when opened. Although an auditing system was in place at the time of the inspection, this had not successfully identified that some liquid medicines were not labelled when opened
- Discussions that took place at the new staff business meeting were not documented and inspectors received mixed feedback about whether staff had been able to attend these. This presented a risk that key information may not be systematically shared with all staff, other than on an ad-hoc basis.
Full details of the inspection are given in the report published on our website.
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