Stafford's County Hospital 'requires improvement' after CQC inspection

Inspectors made an unannounced visit to University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust in October and found the risk management of patients with mental health needs at County Hospital required significant improvement.

Now, the overall rating for the medicine core service at County Hospital, as well as for being safe and effective in this service has moved down from requires improvement to inadequate.

The overall rating for County Hospital remains rated as requires improvement.

As it was a focused inspection at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, the services inspected were not rated, therefore the rating as requires improvement overall remains for the hospital. Safe, responsive and well-led also remain requires improvement. Effective remains good and caring remains outstanding.

Craig Howarth, CQC head of hospital inspection, said: "Following our inspection of University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust, we found that the Royal Stoke University Hospital had made enough improvements around staffing in urgent and emergency care, therefore the warning notice had been met.

"However, this wasn’t the case at County Hospital. There was evidence that changes had not been made as quickly as we would like, and staffing was still an issue. Also, the trust didn’t seem to have a complete overview of the issues in medical services around supporting patients with acute mental health needs.

“The service must also ensure that learning from serious case reviews, audits and incidents are shared and embedded across the trust.

“After the inspection we fed back our findings and concerns to the leadership team. The team have been working hard to put immediate and significant improvements in place and we will return to check on their progress and ensure that these are fully embedded.”

At the County Hospital inspectors found the service did not have enough staff to adequately support patients who required enhanced supervision to protect themselves or others, not all staff had access to good information when working with patients with mental health conditions or symptoms, taff did not receive structured support following incidents of violence or aggression. Oversight of some aspects of managing patients with mental health conditions or symptoms was not in place.

University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust has been approached for a comment.