Blackpool Hospital Trust ordered to make improvement in key services
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has been told make improvement in key areas of patient care.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) carried out unannounced inspection of services in September and October.
They focused on urgent and emergency care, medical care, critical care and surgical care due to continuing concerns about the quality and safety of these departments.
The trust remains rated as 'requires improvement overall and for being safe and effective.' For caring the trust is rated as good, but urgent and emergency care rating has gone down from requires improvement to inadequate.
The trust has been issued with a warning notice requiring them to take action to ensure significant improvements are made with regards to assessing and managing risks to patients.
Ann Ford, CQC’s deputy chief inspector for the north, said:
“When we inspected the trust, there had been a number of new appointments to the leadership team. We found planned improvements were underway, however these were not fully embedded to ensure sustained improvement.
"It is vital that senior leaders are visible and have good oversight to manage and mitigate emerging challenges and risks, and we found that this visibility and oversight was lacking in urgent and emergency care.
“We also found issues with waiting times in medical and surgical care, staff raised concerns that patients were coming to harm while on the waiting list for significant lengths of time, and we weren’t assured that patients’ conditions had been reviewed or prioritised appropriately.
“The trust was working towards an open culture where people could raise concerns without fear, however at the time of the inspection not all staff felt they could do this.
“Although we did find concerns across the trust, we also found that the staff we met were focused on the needs of patients, and there were pockets of outstanding care."
The CQC says the trust has provided an action plan to address our urgent concerns and they will be closely monitored to check on their progress.
On January 4, the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust declared an 'internal critical incident' after it was running at 'full capacity', with long waits in A&E and high staff sickness absence levels of above 10 per cent.
Outbreaks of Covid in the community also resulted in more people being admitted to the hospital each day than those discharged.
That critical incident status, where the trust can postpone routine surgery and seek help from neighbouring trusts, was stood down on January 11.
Some patients are subject to long waits in A&E and are urged to consider GP services and walk in centres, for non urgent care.