The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published a report on St Mary’s Hospital in Warrington, following an inspection which took place in June and July.
CQC carried out this unannounced inspection to follow up on concerns around patient care.
As a result of this inspection, the overall rating remains as requires improvement. It is also rated requires improvement for being safe and well led, and rated good for being effective, caring and responsive to people’s needs.
St Mary's Hospital, run by Elysium Healthcare (St Mary’s) Limited provides specialist care for people with a brain injury, wards for people with learning disabilities and autistic people, as well as a mental health acute ward for adults.
Brian Cranna, CQC’s head of hospital inspection for the north (mental health and community health services), said:
“When we inspected St Mary’s Hospital, we were concerned that there wasn’t enough permanent staff with the right skills and experience to care for patients and give them the specialist support they need. However, managers were working hard to improve this by using the same bank and agency staff, who could get to know people and their individual needs as well as help people feel more comfortable by seeing a familiar face.
“Managers need to work on having better oversight of what’s happening across the hospital. Systems weren’t effective enough to identify and ensure restrictive practices were kept to a minimum. Also, records weren’t up to date, therefore it wasn’t easy to check if processes had been followed when someone was placed in seclusion.
“We looked at incidents which had taken place since our last inspection which included a death at the service in March which is still under investigation. However, we were reassured that staff knew what incidents to report and how to report them in line with their policies. We were also informed of safeguarding incidents that have taken place. At the time of the inspection there were some safeguarding incidents still being investigated.
“We’ve fed back our findings to the provider and they know what improvements need to be made. We will continue to monitor the hospital closely and return to check on their progress.”
Action the service must take to improve:
- Ensure that there are always sufficient numbers of suitably experienced staff deployed to meet the needs of people using the service
- Ensure that the use of blanket restrictions are minimised and any restrictions are individualised decisions based on individualised security and/or clinical considerations
- Ensure that it has robust governance processes to assess, monitor and improve the quality the services provided.
Full details of the inspection are given in the report published on our website.
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