CQC requires improvement at East Lancashire Hospital NHS Trust

16 October 2013

CQC requires improvement at East Lancashire Hospital NHS Trust The Care Quality Commission has told East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust that it must make improvements to comply with national standards of quality and safety.

This follows an unannounced inspection at one of the trust’s sites, Royal Blackburn Hospital in Blackburn, Lancashire on 24, 25 and 26 July 2013. The inspection was carried out in response to information of concern from a whistleblower and focused particularly on the trust’s Accident and Emergency department and emergency care services.

The CQC’s inspection report, which is published today, identifies that the trust was failing to meet three of the four national standards reviewed. Areas of particular concern included:

• Occasions when patients’ dignity was not being respected. For example, failure to ensure patients’ clothing fully protected their dignity and situations where patients were being treated without the use of privacy curtains.
• Not all staff working with children in the accident and emergency department had received formal children’s safeguarding training.
• Instances of poor care and treatment record keeping.
• Inconsistent incident reporting.
• Inadequate patient assessment and risk management arrangements
• Trust wide systems for monitoring service quality were not sufficiently robust to ensure all risks were identified and managed effectively.

As a result of the inspection, CQC has issued two formal warnings to the trust, requiring improvements in relation to standards of care and welfare and assessing and monitoring the quality of service provision.

Inspectors will return, unannounced, to check that the necessary improvements have been made.

Malcolm Bower-Brown, CQC’s Regional Director for the North said:

“Undertaking unannounced inspections in response to information of concern is a vital part of CQC’s role.

“The issues we identified at the Royal Blackburn Hospital are a real concern and the Trust must take further action to ensure national standards are met.

“The Trust is currently in special measures following the recent Keogh Review and we continue to monitor it extremely carefully, working closely with the Trust Development Authority and other agencies, to ensure it makes all the improvements to its services that are required.

“We will not hesitate to take further regulatory action, should this be necessary to ensure patients receive the quality of care and support they are entitled to expect.”

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For further information please contact the CQC Regional Communications Team, David Fryer 07901 514 220 or Kirstin Hannaford 0191 233 3629.

For further information please contact the CQC press office on 0207 448 9401 or out of hours on 07917 232 143.

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Inspectors found that the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust was failing to meet three standards:

• Care and welfare of people who use services
• Safeguarding of service users from abuse
• Assessing and monitoring the quality of service provision