Background to this inspection
Updated
17 June 2020
West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust provides acute healthcare services to a core catchment population of approximately half a million people living in west Hertfordshire and the surrounding area. The trust also provides a range of more specialist services to a wider population, serving residents of North London, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and East Hertfordshire.
There are 663 inpatient beds throughout the trust and over5038 staff are employed across three sites, Watford General Hospital, St Albans City Hospital and Hemel Hempstead General Hospital. There are over 300 volunteers across the trust.
The trusts services are commissioned by Herts Valley Clinical Commissioning Group.
Updated
17 June 2020
Our rating of the trust stayed the same. We rated it as requires improvement because:
We rated effective, caring and well led as good and safe and responsive as requires improvement. This was an improvement from our last inspection when we found caring as good and safe, effective, responsive and well led as requires improvement.
Of the six core services inspected on this occasion, we rated four as good and two as requires improvement.
In rating the overall trust, we took into account the current ratings of the core services not inspected this time. Of the 18 core services across all three sites that have been inspected to date. None were rated as inadequate, two were rated as requires improvement and the remaining services were rated as good. We rated the trust ‘effective’ as good overall even though one of the location (St Albans City Hospital) was ‘requires improvement’. This was because it would be disproportionate due to the size and nature of the services at St Albans minor injuries unit. Although our inspection methodology has changed, we have not inspected diagnostic imaging or outpatient services as individual core services and their combined ratings remain good as of the January 2018 inspection.
We rated well led for the trust overall as good.