BRIDGEWATER Community Healthcare NHS Trust – the organisation which provides community and specialist health services in Warrington – has been told that overall it requires improvement.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated it “good” for providing services that are caring and responsive but “requires improvement” for providing safe, effective and well-led services.
CQC carried out an inspection in May and June last year.
The trust was last inspected in April 2014 when it was told it needed to make improvements to its incident reporting and learning from incidents, ensuring that staff had the appropriate safeguarding training and improving the standard of its record keeping and IT systems.
Since then, the CQC says, there have been a number of changes to senior staff and a concerted effort to improve the culture and support for staff at the trust.
Professor Sir Mike Richards CQC chief inspector of hospitals said: “It was evident that the trust had sought to address the findings of our last inspection and improvements had been made in some areas.
“We found that improvements were needed in end of life care, maternity, urgent care services and dentistry.
“There were significant gaps in the management of medications at the trust, its medicine strategy expired in 2013 and we were not provided with an updated copy.
“Progress had been slow with the improvements needed in some areas and there were still services where more work was needed. Among these were the heathy child programme, the development of the end of life care strategy and the implementation of IT systems that were consistent across the trust.
“We have highlighted the areas where the trust needs to make further changes and its leadership knows what it must now do to ensure any improvements are made. We will continue to monitor the trust’s progress and this will include further inspections.”
The trust has been told it must:
* Ensure the trust medicines strategy and standard operating policy is up to date.
* Ensure there is a trust wide vision for end of life care services, which is in line with national guidelines and recommendations.
* Staff in maternity services must have the necessary competencies, knowledge, skills and experience in order to deliver care and treatment safely during a homebirth.
Inspectors did identify several areas of outstanding practice, however.
Bridgewater has welcomed the publication of the CQC report and outlined improvements made by staff to strengthen services since the inspection eight months ago.
They said the CQC measured 40 domains in total across the services with one rated as outstanding, 27 as good and 12 as requiring improvement.
The CQC rated Bridgewater’s adult community, sexual health and inpatient services as good and the report states that patients told the CQC about “care that was delivered with kindness and compassion” with 97 per cent of patients saying they would recommend services to friends and families.
Bridgewater pointed out that inspectors stated they had seen significant improvements in culture and staffing since the last inspection in 2014.
In the services Bridgewater provides in Warrington:
* Adult services rated as good across the board and the report states there is good joint-working with social services around patient needs. All patients have named nurses and staff have daily handover meetings to discuss patient needs
* Inpatient intermediate care services including those at Padgate House were rated as good, with the caring rated as outstanding. The report stated that “patients and relatives spoke highly of staff and the care that was delivered”
* Sexual health services provided at Bath Street Clinic and in the community were rated as good with the CQC liking the mystery shopper system to test patient satisfaction with the service. Chlamydia screening rates were behind target but inspectors saw clear controls in place to improve them
* In children’s services the inspectors said that staff treat children with kindness, dignity and respect in an age appropriate way.
Colin Scales, chief executive at Bridgewater said: “I’m proud and delighted that the inspectors have rated our services as caring without exception and that the report has highlighted the compassion and dedication of our staff and the difference they make providing care to patients every day.
“I’m really pleased they have been publicly recognised for this and that our outstanding clinical practice has attracted the praise it deserves.
“We’ve matured as an organisation since our establishment in 2011 and have a new chief nurse and medical director who are focusing on improving and developing our diverse services across the region. Our commitment is to ensure that our standards are high across each and every service and that we move on a journey towards being a trust that is rated as good and
then outstanding. All the essential actions the CQC has asked us look at have already been addressed since the inspectors were on site, so we’ve made a lot of progress and are in a stronger position now as we move forward.”
Inspectors also visited Bridgewater in Wigan, Halton, St Helens and other parts of Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside. More than 1.5 million people use Bridgewater’s services each year, the majority of which are delivered in patients’ homes or at locations close to where they live such as clinics, health centres, GP practices, community centres and schools.
The full CQC Report can be viewed at www.cqc.org.uk
