Hospital trust comes out of special measures

United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust has today (Friday 27 March) been taken out of special measures.

The  NHS Trust Development Authority (TDA) has made this decision in recognition of significant work to improve quality of services at the Trust.

This follows a CQC re-inspection in February and a recommendation made by the CQC’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Mike Richards.

Trust Chief Executive, Jane Lewington said: “I am always so proud of our staff’s dedication and commitment to delivering compassionate and high quality care, but today I am beyond proud.

“It is the hard work, the passion and the resilience of our staff that has led to the Trust being taken out of special measures.

“I cannot overstate the massive progress we have made as a Trust over the last 20 months. The CQC inspectors recognised the continuing  improvements we’ve made to the quality and safety of our care.

“The CQC have said quite clearly that the Trust has taken ‘significant action’ since the last inspection in 2014 and made a ‘substantial’ number of improvements. Patients can be confident in our staff and in our services.

“Although the Trust’s overall rating of “requires improvement” remains the same, the detail behind this is very different from last year  –  83% of our ratings are now  “good” or “outstanding” – 47% more than last year.

“Coming out of special measures is a very significant achievement for us but our real goal is to ensure that we continuously strive to deliver the very best care for all our patients .

“Our priorities are now to continue to recruit more nurses, doctors and clinical staff into post, to fundamentally review our patient appointment systems and to complete the work on improving the hospital environment.”

Trust Chairman Ron Buchanan said: “This is a fantastic achievement and is testament to the outstanding contribution of our wonderful workforce. On behalf of the Board I would like to thank all our colleagues for their unstinting commitment to delivering high quality care for our patients.

“This outcome is also a tribute to the work of the senior leadership team who have maintained a strong impetus to all of our improvement programmes.

“They have also created a more open culture, where our people feel comfortable in speaking up about safety concerns, which in turn improves the overall patient experience.

“As we look to the future, we shall not be complacent but will seek to embed all the improvements we have made and continuously enhance our service quality.

“In addition to our own actions we need to continue to align closely with our partners to transform the shape of services for the people of Lincolnshire.

“We look forward to progressing this work at pace”.

Portfolio Director at the NHS Trust Development Authority,Jeffrey Worrall said: “This is a fantastic achievement for the Trust which recognises the intensive work and dedication that staff have put into improving services for their patients.

“With their enthusiasm and inspirational focus, the Trust’s teams have used the additional support under special measures to address significant challenges and deliver great improvements to care quality and the patient experience.

“We will continue to support them with ongoing work to progress further improvements and deliver high quality care sustainably across all operational areas at the Trust.”

The CQC inspection team rated that overall the Trust “requires improvement”. They continue to rate our staff to be caring and compassionate on all wards, highlighted significant engagement with our clinical staff, and the outstanding practice in involving former complainants in the recruitment of staff.

The CQC inspection team looked at eight service areas across our four hospitals: A&E, medical care, surgery, critical care, maternity, children and young people, end of life care, and outpatients. Most services, and the Trust overall, were assessed against five domains: whether they were safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.

Against this, the Trust received three ‘good’, and two ‘requires improvement’ ratings. This is big improvement since 2014 when we received four ‘requires improvement’ and one ‘good’. Out of a possible 113 individual ratings, 94 areas were rated as good or outstanding.

The inspection team highlighted areas of good practice in their report. These include:

• Patients cared for by supportive, caring and informative nursing and medical staff
• Critical care unit at Lincoln being rated outstanding for its responsive care
• Strong local leaders at all hospitals and departments
• Progress on complaints with clinicians now being central to how complaints are investigated
• Approachable, hands-on senior management team appreciated by staff.

 

The team also highlighted areas which had been improved since the inspection in 2014. These include:

• A&E departments now more responsive to patients and families
• Better signage for patients whose first language isn’t English
• Condition of medical records
• Empowered medical and nursing staff through better engagement and particularly in service change.
• Good progress on infection control with a new energised infection control team
• Good progress on core learning and appraisals, and evidence of good practice at ward level
• Availability of equipment to improve the safety of services
• Good practice in medicines management and fewer prescribing errors
• Improvements in safety of the outpatient department at Lincoln
• Increased staffing to help 7 day working
• Turnaround of quality of care on trauma ward (formerly Stow) at Lincoln

However, the CQC team highlighted areas where we still need to make further improvements. These are around recruiting more staff in some services, managing and monitoring systems at County Hospital, Louth and the need to review trust-wide systems for patient appointments.

Over the next few weeks the Trust will be holding a summit with our partners to focus our combined efforts on future proofing our services and workforce.