Nottinghamshire Healthcare found to need improvement by inspectors

A Nottinghamshire health trust has been told it requires improvement in its latest CQC report.
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Nottinghamshire Healthcare, the county’s mental health, intellectual disability and community health service provider has been found to be providing services that require improvement, but has retained good ratings for effectiveness and the caring attitude of its staff.

The announcement comes following an intensive five day inspection of the Trust’s services earlier this year 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: “The CQC report has been published today and I am disappointed, but not surprised that the Trust has been 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. “

The CQC Inspectors report said: “We rated two services as requires improvement in the well-led domain and one as inadequate. Our rating took into account the previous ratings of services not inspected this time.

“Overall the safety of services had deteriorated since our last inspection. In acute wards and psychiatric intensive care units our rating went down from requires improvement to inadequate. In forensic inpatient services our rating for safe went down from good to inadequate.”

It added that the executive team lacked confidence in carrying out actions in between one chief executive retiring and another commencing. The chair was on various boards outside of the trust. The impact of this led to some loss of leadership focus and action within the trust.

There was a disconnect between operational staff and the board in the communication of messages and a lack of consultation and engagement. Relationships between Rampton Hospital medical consultants and management had

continued to deteriorate since our last two inspections in 2017 and 2018. Staff did not feel equally respected, upported and valued across all sectors within the trust. The 2018 staff survey results showed in all areas the trust sat below its comparator group and towards the lower end of the scoring range. Morale and staff engagement were equivalent to the worst score.