THE Care Quality Commission recently carried out an unannounced inspection of Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester and the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch.
The inspections come at the end of a turbulent year for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust which looked to have finally turned the corner and moved from being rated ‘Inadequate’ by the CQC to ‘Requires Improvement’ and finally moving out of special measures.
However that was before a string of poor headlines that brought WAHT unwanted national attention.
Just this month Paul Reid, a Royal Army Medical Corps veteran from Redditch described conditions at the Royal as ‘worse than Iraq and Afghanistan’.
Paul dad, who was 91 and who had suffered a stroke, waiting more than seven hours in an ambulance waiting to be admitted after suffering a stroke.
When he got in he was cared for in a corridor and his dignity was compromised.
In November, a man died after being kept waiting in an ambulance outside Worcestershire Royal Hospital for an hour.
It was back in March that an earlier CQC inspection of the Emergency Department at the Royal hit out at overcrowding in the unit, care in corridors, ambulances handover taking too long, and insufficient staff.
At the time it led chief executive Matthew Hopkins to say: “We cannot – and will not – accept the routine use of corridors to care for patients, or the long waits that keep ambulances off the road, or the conditions that our Emergency Department teams are currently working in.”
In May NHS Improvement joined the trust to implement a series of Enforcement Undertakings to provide safer services.
It paid dividends. A further CQC inspection in May and June but published in September, found a marked improvement, with the work of the imaging team at the Alex in Redditch singled out as ‘Outstanding’.
The trust, which had previously rated as ‘Inadequate’ by the CQC and in ‘Special Measures’ moved up a notch, to ‘Requires Improvement’ and was taken out of special measures.
On other fronts there have also been improvements.
Financially, the trust has been set an agreed deficit of £82million for this financial year but it looking at coming under that at £73m if all goes to plan.
Meanwhile WAHT’s next door neighbour, South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust has become the first acute and community health care provider in the Midlands to receive an ‘Outstanding’ grading from the CQC.
