CQC inspections

In May 2019 the Trust was found by the CQC to be providing services that require improvement, but retained good ratings for effectiveness and the caring attitude of its staff.

This announcement followed an intensive five day inspection of the Trust’s services when inspectors from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) came to the Trust’s sites in and around Nottinghamshire to check whether the Trust provided services that were caring, responsive, safe, effective and well led.

Dr John Brewin is Chief Executive of Nottinghamshire Healthcare:  “I am disappointed, but not surprised that the Trust was rated as Requires Improvement. We accept the overall verdict of the inspection team; that we need to improve in every domain. The only domains where we have maintained our Good rating is in caring and effectiveness, which is reassuring but we all need to do more. This is never a great position to be in but I think we need to learn from this feedback and focus our attention on where we can add most value and not only improve patient care but also the employment experience of our staff. We say we want Nottinghamshire Healthcare to be a great place to work, but that is not the experience of many of our staff and we need to change that.

“We will learn from the recommendations made by the CQC and value the focus they have given to some areas of outstanding good practice in our services. I am convinced that we should be confident about the future. There are great staff and services in the Trust – we need to work to harness that passion and commitment to make sure that we turn things around for the sake of our patients, service users and carers."

 

Improvements reflected in recent reports

In September 2020, the CQC published a report following an inspection of the Trust's Adult Mental Health inpatient wards in July 2020.  The report highlights many areas of good practice and improvements made.  The services were found to be safe, well led and caring and compassionate.  Patients are treated with care, compassion and dignity, involving them and their families and carers throughout.  It also notes how staff work to address issues and incidents, and learn from them.  

Julie Attfield, Executive Director of Mental Health Services said:  “I am really pleased to see the improvement acknowledged in this report.  In not easy circumstances over the last few months, this is a credit to all the staff working in our AMH inpatient services who have worked tirelessly to provide good clinical care.  There is always investment and energy needed to achieve such improvement and I am really committed to ensure that we carry on in this journey.  My unreserved thanks to everyone for your contributions; you should feel rightly proud about what they have achieved.”   

The full report is available to download from the CQC website.

Unfortunately, great inspection results like this will not affect our overall Trust rating.  This is because due to Covid-19, the CQC is not currently undertaking comprehensive inspections. From October they are introducing a broader, largely remote review of services using existing Key Lines of Enquiry, they will initially scrutinise safety, access to services and leadership before expanding this approach to include additional areas of focus.  The new approach will not lead to a review of ratings. Instead providers will be judged as presenting either high, medium, low or no risk. This risk profile will then form the basis of the CQC’s response which may include a physical inspection of services. They’ll then publish a statement on their website and we will make any statements available here.  

Two other assessments recently took place of our Learning Disability service and Infection, Prevention and Conrol practices.  You can read the summary reports below

20200721 IPC Assessment Summary Report.pdf [pdf] 133KB

Inspection Report LD Services Final Published.pdf [pdf] 271KB