South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust Requires Improvement says CQC

The Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust as Requires Improvement overall after its inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

A team of inspectors, including specialist advisors and experts by experience visited the trust during March 2016 as part of its programme of inspections of all NHS mental health trusts.

South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust provides services to a population of over 1.1 million people. They also provide a number of specialist services used by people from across the UK.

CQC has rated three services as Requires Improvement: community based mental health services for adults of working age and for older people and the rehabilitation mental health wards for working age adults.

The main areas for improvement included:

• Most wards providing rehabilitation were not supporting patients to achieve greater independence
• Across a number of wards and teams staff were not being supported with regular one to one supervision
• Administrative changes meant some patients were not receiving appointment letters, there were delays in information reaching GPs and staff at the trust were not able to access patient information they needed for outpatient appointments.

Inspectors found seven core services to be Good. These were:

• Acute wards and the psychiatric intensive care unit
• Forensic inpatient wards including the high secure service
• Wards for older people with mental health problems
• Ward for children and adolescents with mental health problems
• Mental health crisis services and health based places of safety
• Specialist community mental health services for children and young people
• Community mental health services for people with a learning disability

CQC inspectors also found that there had been significant improvements in the care delivered to people who had an acute mental illness. Whilst demand was still very high and this presented a daily challenge, patients had an improved level of support to access the services they clinically needed. Staff had access to a wide range of opportunities for learning and development, which was helping many people to make progress with their career whilst also improving the care they delivered. The trust was working with local communities to overcome the stigma of mental illness and make services more accessible.

Paul Lelliott, the Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals and CQC’s lead for mental health, said: “There are some areas where we have asked the trust to focus on, including providing support to patients to achieve greater independence.

“In some teams staff were not being supported with regular one to one supervision.

“Despite these areas for improvement there was much for the trust to be proud of. The senior executive team were committed to improving services and providing a high standard of care for patients. Most staff said they enjoyed working for the trust, were caring, professional and in many cases innovative in their work.

“We will expect the trust to address the issues we found during our inspection and we will be returning to inspect again in due course”

Read the full report.

Ends

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