Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is rated Good by Chief Inspector of Hospitals

England's Chief Inspector of Hospitals has found Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to be Good after an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.

The trust was rated as Good for being safe, caring, effective, responsive and well led. Overall CQC rated the trust as Good.

The Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Northern General Hospital, Charles Clifford Dental Hospital and the community services were rated as Good. The Weston Park Hospital was rated as Requires Improvement overall, although caring was rated as outstanding at the hospital.

The full report, including ratings, is available at: www.cqc.org.uk/provider/RHQ

The main findings included:

• There was effective leadership of the board and across the organisation. The trust had a clear vision and corporate strategy, which was known and understood by staff. The trust’s values were clearly embedded across the organisation.
• Appropriate systems and procedures were in place to keep patients safe, including safeguarding and infection control.
• Systems were in place to ensure that patients received evidence-based care. Monitoring showed the trust performed well when compared with other hospitals.
• Feedback from patients and relatives was positive about the care they received.
• We found effective systems in place to support the needs of individual patients, including those living with dementia.

Inspectors identified some areas where the trust must improve including:

• The trust must improve processes in the emergency department to ensure patients do not wait longer than the recommended standard for assessment and treatment.
• The trust must ensure there is a clear strategy for end of life care, which is implemented and monitored.
• The trust must continue to review staffing levels in some specialist areas including Weston Park and the Emergency Department.

The Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards, said:

“We found the care at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to be of a good standard. There was a clear vision and strategy for delivering the highest standards of patient care with quality and safety as a key focus. Inspectors noted that there was a culture of innovation and improvement, evident throughout all levels of the organisation. There was a well-established culture of continuous improvement at the trust and they had good systems for supporting small scale service improvements.

“We found very positive examples of patient care. On the intensive care units, an electronic patient information system was in use, which ensured effective care was delivered and it was fully integrated and provided real-time information across teams and services. Within midwifery, the one to one team and specialist midwife clinics gave greater assurance that high risk women continued to have a choice on the care they received in pregnancy.”

“They are also doing some outstanding work through their community dental service, providing exceptional support to residential care homes through collaboration with local partners. Their clinical lead was also instrumental in developing a national benchmarking tool for describing the complexity of patients treated by the community dental services. Other hospitals will I am sure want to benefit from this good practice.

“This report identifies many areas where the trust, across a number of sites, has been prepared to innovate and introduce new pathways of care and it is clear that a number of these are bearing results. The trust is to be congratulated and I look forward to seeing how these changes bring even greater benefits to patients in the future.”

There were a number of areas where inspectors identified outstanding practice including:

• The trust had a number of initiatives that had been nationally recognised as good practice. For example, the active recovery team was an innovative service. It was the first in England to provide this model of care and had been cited by the Royal College of Physicians as an exemplar of good practice.
• Another example was the duty floor anaesthetist role in theatre, developed in Sheffield, which was going to be used by the Royal College of Anaesthetists as a beacon of good practice.
• For community inpatients, feedback received from patients was consistently positive about the way nursing and therapy staff treated them. Patients told us that staff go the extra mile. Staff and patients confirmed that the unit had a flexible approach to care.
• At Weston Park Hospital specialised cancer services provided a patient-centred holistic approach to patient care where the whole multidisciplinary team worked together to ensure the patient’s experience of the service was the best that it could be.
• At the same location, the teenage cancer unit had a number of innovations which had been paid for out of charitable funds. These included a ‘couples retreat’ for end of life patients and their partners. They could spend time away from home and explore issues about coming to the end of life.

The reports which CQC publishes today are based on a combination of its inspection findings, information from CQC’s intelligent monitoring system, and information provided by patients, the public and other organisations.

CQC carried out an announced inspection from 7 to 11 December 2015 and undertook an unannounced inspection on 23 December 2015.The team included CQC inspectors and a variety of specialists including: medical, surgical and midwives, nurses, allied health professionals, community nursing staff, a dentist, junior doctors and a paediatric doctor.

Ends

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