We have announced the 7 acute, community and mental health providers that we will inspect in December 2015, as part of our planned comprehensive programme.
The inspections – which are carried out by a mixture of inspectors, clinicians, and experts by experience – will assess whether the service overall is: safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well-led.
Following the inspection, each provider will receive an overall rating of either: Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate. Additionally, each of the eight core services will also be rated in the same way to provide performance information at a service, hospital and trust level.
Our inspection regime allows us to get under the skin of services better than ever before and to provide a clear picture of what care is really like. We hope this encourages improvement and helps people to make informed choices about their care.
As of Monday 27 July, we have rated:
- 2 NHS trusts as Outstanding
- 29 as Good
- 65 as Requires Improvement and;
- 12 as Inadequate.
The providers listed below have been selected for their planned, comprehensive inspections for different reasons. These include hospitals that are priorities for inspection and those that are low risk, following CQC’s analysis of information of acute and mental health services and a commitment to inspect different types of trusts in different parts of the country.
Acute
- Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust
- Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
- The Whittington Hospital NHS Trust
- Bedford Hospital NHS Trust
- Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Combined acute and community health services
- Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Combined Mental health and community health services
- Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
During December, we do not have any planned inspections that follow-up on previous visits to check that improvements have been made or those that focus on specific services or issues (known as focused inspections).
Our inspections that are in response to particular concerns (for example, based on information that we have received) will continue to be unannounced.
As outlined in our business plan, we expect to complete our inspections of acute NHS trusts by the end of March 2016, and our inspections of acute specialist, mental health, community healthcare and ambulance trusts by the end of June 2016.