The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated the services provided by Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to be Outstanding.
A team of CQC inspectors visited the trust between 21 May and 28 June 2019 to assess three core services across four of the trust’s hospitals: urgent and emergency services, medical care and maternity at Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, medical care at North Tyneside General Hospital and maternity at both Alnwick Infirmary and Berwick Infirmary. Inspectors also looked specifically at management and leadership to answer the key question: is the trust well-led?
The trust had previously been rated Outstanding in May 2016. It has maintained its overall rating of Outstanding following the latest inspection. It also maintained its previous ratings of Outstanding for being effective, caring and responsive and Good for being safe. The trust level well-led was rated as Good.
The full report, including ratings, is available at: www.cqc.org.uk/provider/RTF
Sarah Dronsfield, Head of Hospital Inspection, said:
“It is fantastic to have found this trust be Outstanding for a second time. The quality of care and support we saw being managed and provided was of a very high standard.
“We found a number of outstanding examples of care, particularly in medical care and maternity, where the trust was really pushing up the standards of care for the benefit of patient outcomes. We also found many of our previous concerns had been addressed well and the trust was working hard to advance its services overall.
“Our findings have been made clear to the trust and where we have found concerns we will follow these up through our ongoing engagement with them. We will continue to monitor the trust and return to reinspect when appropriate.”
Inspectors found the majority of the previous safety concerns had been either improved upon or fully addressed, and despite challenges the emergency departments were well staffed by qualified nursing and medical staff who addressed patient’s needs quickly. Staff were supportive to patients and enabled them to make informed decisions about their care and knew how to support patients that lacked capacity, tailoring the care as appropriate. Additionally, in the emergency department, there had been no patients who had waited longer than 12 hours in the service without being admitted in the same time. The department had also met the national four-hour target for eight of the 12 months from March 2018 to February 2019.
Feedback from people receiving care, their friends and relatives and stakeholders about services and the way staff treated patients was consistently positive, including examples when staff had exceeded their expectations of care. Staff recognised and applied people’s personal, cultural, social and religious needs as an important part of their care and support planning and delivery.
Following significant reconfiguration of the trust’s maternity services, in 2015, the latest inspection reported the service had clear and robust polices to ensure people’s safety was risk assessed and timely care was provided consistently. People were treated with compassion, kindness and appropriate emotional support. Staff were knowledgeable on the trust’s vision for quality services and worked to embed improvements into the service to benefit people’s care. Inspectors noted outstanding practice in the service, including an integrated midwife team working across the local community and hospital sites, alongside a teaching clinic to train medical students and develop best practice.
When looking at whether the trust was well-led, inspectors found leaders had the right skills and experience to run the services, and understood the priorities and management required to address the challenges the services faced. There was a shared vision for care and a strategy for sustaining quality aligned with local and wider healthcare economies. Open engagement between staff, leaders and people was encouraged throughout the trust and inspectors saw a commitment to continuous learning and improvement. Staff felt valued and respected, a positive culture was evident throughout the trust and staff said they felt proud to work for the organisation.
CQC has also published the trust’s Use of Resources (UoR) report, which is based on an assessment undertaken by NHS Improvement. The trust has been rated as Outstanding for using its resources productively. The combined rating for the trust, taking into account CQC’s inspection for the quality of services and NHSI’s assessment of Use of Resources, is Outstanding.
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