England's Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust as Requires Improvement overall following a CQC inspection.
Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust was rated Good following an inspection in 2018. On CQC’s return – between 8 October and 12 November 2019 - inspectors found improvements were needed and the trust is now rated as Requires Improvement overall.
In two of the five key questions CQC asks – are trust’s services effective and well-led - ratings have changed from Good to Requires Improvement. The rating for whether services are safe remains as Requires Improvement and the ratings for whether services are caring and responsive are still Good.
CQC’s Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Kevin Cleary, said:
“We found a number of areas where improvements were needed when we returned to Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust.
“In January 2018 the trust was rated as Good overall but, during our most recent inspection, we found a deterioration in the service being delivered in a number of areas.
“Improvements were needed across the services we inspected and the trust needed to ensure systems were in place to keep people safe, that it could mitigate risks to people’s safety and ensure there were sufficient staff available to deliver care.
“However, we were encouraged to find a number of areas of outstanding and good practice. Among these were forensic and community child and adolescent mental health services which had maintained their ratings of Good overall. The trust was responsive to people’s needs and staff were caring. There was also a commitment to ensuring the well-being of its staff and to working with other organisations to further research in mental health.
“Following our inspection we gave feedback to the trust about our inspection findings. The trust leadership knows what it must do to ensure it improves its services and we will continue to monitor its progress, which will include further inspections.”
The trust has been told it must make improvements, including:
- The trust must have systems and processes that are effective for ensuring staff maintain accurate, complete and contemporaneous records
- Systems and processes must ensure the trust has sufficient staff available for all services, that caseloads are within the recommended number in community mental health services, and that staff receive the required mandatory training and clinical supervision
- The trust must ensure systems and processes are established and operate effectively to mitigate risks relating to the health, safety and welfare of people using the service and others who may be at risk, including ligature risk assessments
- Clinical and local audits must be completed to ensure they contain all relevant information to prevent harm to people using the trust’s services
- The trust must ensure care and treatment of service users in community mental health teams for adults must be appropriate, meet their needs and reflect their preferences
- The trust must ensure that care and treatment is provided in a safe way for service users
Inspectors witnessed some areas of outstanding practice across the trust, including:
- In November 2019 the trust won the Health Service Journal award for the freedom to speak up organisation of the year in recognition of the work it did in supporting staff to raise concerns and to support the delivery of safe patient care
- The grounded research team have also been nominated for a number of awards and in October 2019 they won the award for clinical research nursing at the nursing times awards
- The trust ran a number of initiatives that focussed on staff well-being – from running clubs to yoga – and it had won a number of awards including the workplace health initiative in the Be Well@Work Workplace Health Awards
- The trust was the first mental health trust to join the Northern Health Science Alliance which has seen the North’s leading universities, research-intensive NHS trusts and four academic health science networks, come together to support research in the UK and internationally
- Linked to this, the grounded research team had been nominated for a number of awards and in October 2019 won the award for clinical research nursing at the Nursing Times Awards
- Although the trust participates in the learning disability mortality programme, it completed its own review of deaths of patients with a learning disability to ensure any learning was implemented in a timely way
Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health and learning disability services across Rotherham, Doncaster, North Lincolnshire, and substance misuse services in Doncaster. The trust provides community health services across Doncaster, school nursing in Scunthorpe and a hospice in Doncaster. It also provides adult social care services in Doncaster.
Full reports for the trust will be published on CQC’s website at the following link: www.cqc.org.uk/provider/RXE
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