EMERGENCY care services at the Alexandra Hospital have gone up from ‘inadequate’ to ‘requires improvement’ following a recent inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Medical care at the Alex and the overall rating for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust both remain at ‘requires improvement’.
Charlotte Rudge, CQC deputy director of operations in the Midlands, said: “When we inspected urgent and emergency and medical services at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, it was positive to see improvements had been made since our last inspection, but further work is needed to ensure people receive appropriate care.
“The trust has started to make progress in urgent and emergency care at both hospitals where we saw leaders running services well and staff being supported to develop their skills.
“However, staff didn’t always complete risk assessments in a timely way for each person on arrival and there were sometimes long handover times from ambulance to the department which delayed assessment and treatment.”
Although there were improvements, the report found there was a lack of paediatric nurses, duplicating of medicine charts and they did not always have safe process and systems in place to manage the prescribing, storage, and monitoring of medications.
Responding to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) report, Matthew Hopkins, Chief Executive of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “We are pleased that the positive progress we have made to improve care for patients in our emergency departments has been recognised and our overall rating in this area has improved at both the Alexandra and Worcestershire Royal Hospitals.
“Following the inspection in November, a number of immediate actions were taken to address areas of concern – for example, improving the way we safely discharge patients home, or the place they call home, from our dedicated discharge lounges.
“A detailed action plan following the publication of the report will now be developed and implemented to continue the improvements.”
