The Care Quality Commission
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Goole & District Hospital

Overall: Good read more about inspection ratings

Woodland Road, Goole, Humberside, DN14 6RX (01405) 720720

Provided and run by:
Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust

All Inspections

During an assessment of Outpatients

Goole and District Hospital outpatients department is part of Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. The department is open Monday to Friday, with one evening clinic per week. In the 12 months before our assessment the department had 15,815 attendances. 14 specialities had clinics in Goole and District Hospital outpatients department.

Two Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors conducted an onsite assessment visit for outpatients between 10 to 11 February 2026. This was due to an aged rating.

We assessed all quality statements from the safe, effective, caring, responsive, and well-led key questions.

We spoke to 4 patients, 8 staff, 4 leaders and reviewed 3 sets of patient notes. We attended the safety meeting.

We rated the outpatient department at Goole and District Hospital as Good overall. This had not changed since our last assessment in December 2022.

Staff demonstrated kindness and compassion in the interactions we observed and the patients we spoke to felt listened to and treated as individuals. Leaders and staff told us there were enough staff to meet patients’ needs, and we saw examples of workplace wellbeing in practice. Staff worked well together to support each other and patients. However, evidence from staff discussions and incident reporting data indicated some staff lacked understanding of what should be reported as a patient safety event.

We found continued breaches of regulation in relation to waiting times for new and follow up appointments, including performance against the national NHS 62-day cancer performance target. At this assessment we identified two breaches of regulations in relation to Safe care and treatment (Regulation 12) and Good Governance (Regulation 17).

If we have requested an action plan, this will be requested upon publication of the final report.

During an assessment of the hospital overall

Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust provide a comprehensive range of NHS hospital services for approximately 450,000 people living in the Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Goole region. The Trust has three hospitals sites with approximately 750 inpatient beds.


We carried out an assessment of the outpatient department at Goole and District Hospital. The assessment commenced with an unannounced visit on 10 and 11 February 2026 by two inspectors. The assessment focussed on thirty-three quality statements under the safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led key questions. Following the assessment the outpatient department had an overall rating of good.


The rating of Goole and District Hospital outpatient department has been combined with the ratings of the other services from the last inspections. See our previous reports to get a full picture of all the other services at Goole and District Hospital. The rating of Goole and District Hospital remains good.


We found continued breaches of regulation in relation to waiting times for new and follow up appointments, including performance against the national NHS 62-day cancer performance target. At this assessment we identified two breaches of regulations in relation to Safe care and treatment (Regulation 12) and Good Governance (Regulation 17).

21 November 2023

During an inspection looking at part of the service

Pages 1 to 3 of this report relate to the hospital and the ratings of that location, from page 4 the ratings and information relate to maternity services based at Goole Hospital.

Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust provides a range of maternity services for women at three acute hospital sites.

We inspected the maternity service at Goole Hospital as part of our national maternity inspection programme. The programme aims to give an up-to-date view of hospital maternity care across the country and help us understand what is working well to support learning and improvement at a local and national level.

The Goole Hospital provides maternity services to the population of East Riding. There are high levels of deprivation with North East Lincolnshire being one of the 20% most deprived areas in England and 26% of children living in low income families.

The maternity service at Goole is a small standalone birthing unit which offers a home from home low risk midwifery-led unit, run by community midwifery teams and offering antenatal clinics, and an on-call childbirth service for women and pregnant people who want a step up from a home birth. The unit had one delivery room with a birthing pool. There are no other inpatient obstetric or neonatal services onsite. The unit therefore supports low risk women and birthing people who want a birth in a ‘home away from home’ setting. Those considered high risk are transferred to Scunthorpe General Hospital (the consultant led unit) for delivery.

A weekly obstetric clinic is available for women at Goole District Hospital who meet high risk criteria and need consultant led care closer to home.

Between October 2022 and October 2023, 6 babies were born at Goole and District Hospital midwifery led unit (MLU).

We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.

We carried out a short notice announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.

This location was last inspected under our full comprehensive inspection programme in November 2019. The overall rating was good.

Our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as Good.

How we carried out the inspection

We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.

We visited the Goole midwifery led unit (MLU).

We spoke with 4 midwives and 1 midwifery support worker. We were unable to speak with any women, birthing people, birthing partners or relatives. We received no responses to our give feedback on care posters which were provided to the service to display and share with people during the inspection.

We reviewed 3 patient care records and 2 medicines records. We also interviewed key members of staff, medical staff and the senior management.

Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders who were responsible for the leadership and oversight of the service. We also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, guidelines, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents as well as audits and action plans. We then used this information to form our judgements.

You can find further information about how we carry out our inspections on our website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/what-we-do/how-we-do-our-job/what-we-do-inspection.

28th-30th June

During a routine inspection

Goole and District Hospital (GDH) is one of the three hospital sites for Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. It is located in Goole and serves the population of East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.

GDH is the trust’s smallest hospital. The hospital provides non-acute medical care, elective surgery, outpatients and diagnostic imaging and midwifery led maternity services for children, young people and adults primarily in the North East Lincolnshire area. The neuro rehabilitation centre is at GDH, the centre offers specialist services for individuals following severe brain injury and a range of other neurological conditions.

24 September to 27 September 2019

During a routine inspection

Our rating of services stayed the same. We rated it them as requires improvement because:

  • There had been little progress identified in this inspection and in some services a deterioration.
  • Within outpatients continued backlogs were identified and within diagnostic imaging there was also an increased backlog of patient awaiting diagnostic image services and the subsequent reporting of x-rays. There were unknown risks due to these backlogs.
  • There had been incidents where patients had come to harm due to delays in receiving appointments in both outpatients and diagnostic imaging. We had significant concerns regarding this and after the inspection, the Care Quality Commission completed a section 31 letter of intent to seek further clarification from the trust.
  • In maternity we were not assured leaders had oversight of clear and reliable midwifery and nurse staffing data; and we saw sickness rates were high. Community caseloads exceeded the recommended ratio of 96 to 98 cases per WTE midwife. A high proportion of community clinics had been cancelled in the 12 months prior to inspection.
  • The service provided mandatory training in key skills to staff but had not ensured everyone had complete it. Across most services there were continued low levels of mandatory training.
  • Investigations of complaints were not managed in a timely way and in line with trust policy.
  • Across most services there continued to be a lack of clear strategies at this level.
  • Systems to manage performance were not consistently used to improve performance.
  • There continued to be changes in the governance structures and processes which had not become embedded and therefore there was limited oversight.
  • There was limited evidence of continuous improvement and innovation across most core services.

However:

  • Staff treated patients with compassion and kindness, respected their privacy and dignity, and took account of their individual needs.
  • Overall staff felt respected, supported and valued.
  • Most services had an open culture where patients, their families and staff could raise concerns without fear.

8 May 2018

During an inspection looking at part of the service

Our rating of services went down. We rated them as requires improvement because:

  • We rated safe, effective, responsive and well led as requires improvement and caring as good.
  • At this inspection we saw improvements in some of the hospital’s services but some services had deteriorated since our previous inspection
  • We rated three of the hospital’s five services as good, one as requires improvement and one as inadequate.
  • There was limited evidence that staff had the skills, training and experience to provide the right care and treatment. For example, appraisal rates for a number of staff groups were worse than the trust target and mandatory training rates in four of the five services at the hospital were below the trust target of 85%.
  • We found examples in medical care and outpatients where there had not been sufficient effective senior clinical oversight to manage risk and respond to urgent or changing patient needs.
  • The total number of patients on outpatient waiting lists had increased since the previous inspection.
  • Services at the hospital did not have a vision, strategy or business plan. We saw examples where service delivery did not seem to have been addressed, for example, the delayed discharges in medical care and utilisation of the birthing suite.
  • The hospital did not engage effectively with patients, staff, and the public to plan and manage services.

However:

  • Staff cared for patients with care and compassion and respected patients’ wishes. Staff provided individualised care and involved patients and those close to them in decisions about their care and treatment
  • Staff worked together as a team to benefit patients. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals supported each other to provide good care.
  • Staff felt well-supported by their local leaders and the culture of the hospital was patient-centred.

13 – 16 October 2015

During a routine inspection

We inspected Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (the trust) from 13 – 16 October 2015. This inspection was to review and rate the Trust’s community services for the first time using the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) new methodology for comprehensive inspections. It was also an acute hospital focused inspection to follow up our concerns from the April 2014 comprehensive inspection and highlighted through other information routes.

Focused inspections do not look across a whole service; they focus on the areas defined by the information that triggers the need for the focused inspection. We therefore did not inspect all the core services at Goole hospital for this follow up inspection. Additionally not all of the five domains: safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led were inspected for each of the core services we inspected. For the 2015 inspection we inspected the effective domain for the emergency and urgent core service (the minor injuries unit). This was because it had not been rated in 2014. We inspected maternity services because of concerns we had received. Diagnostic services were inspected for the first time and we followed up the responsive domain in outpatients from our 2014 inspection.

Overall at the 2015 inspection we rated Goole hospital as good. We rated Goole minor injuries unit (MIU) as ‘good’ for being effective. Maternity services and diagnostic imaging services were rated as ‘good’ overall.

Our key findings were as follows:

  • There was good evidence-based care and treatment within the MIU although some of the guidelines were past their review dates; work was taking place to action this.
  • Given that this was a small MIU in a small hospital there was good access to services seven days a week.
  • Women who chose to give birth at the hospital received two midwives to one woman care during labour and escalation procedures were in place to ensure there were sufficient staff. The unit provided individualised care and patients were treated with privacy, dignity and respect.
  • The maternity birthing pool and antenatal clinic were visibly clean.
  • The rates for patients who did not attend appointments in outpatients had improved since our last inspection, but clinic cancellation rates were worse, apart from in ophthalmology.
  • Outpatients and diagnostic imaging patients received harm-free care and treatment in a clean and well-equipped hospital from staff who had received appropriate training. Although radiology was short of medical staff across the trust, this did not affect patient care.
  • Patients in ophthalmology outpatients and radiology told us they were happy with the care and treatment they received. They told us staff were kind, caring and compassionate.

However, there were also areas of poor practice where the trust needs to make improvements at this hospital. Importantly, the trust must:

  • seek and act on feedback from service users in radiology in order to evaluate and improve the service.
  • ensure it acts upon its own gap analysis of maternity services to deliver effective management of clinical risk and practice development.
  • review the rate of cancellations of outpatient appointments and rates of ‘did not attend’ at Goole and take action to improve these in order to ensure safe and timely care and to meet the trust’s own standards of 6%.

Professor Sir Mike Richards

Chief Inspector of Hospitals

To Be Confirmed

During a routine inspection

Goole and District Hospital is one of three acute hospitals within Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. This trust has been selected as one of the first trusts to be inspected under CQC’s revised inspection approach. It was selected for inspection as an example of a ‘high-risk’ trust.

Goole and District Hospital is a small, purpose-built, community hospital providing care and treatment for the people of East Riding. This hospital has a minor injuries unit but does not provide accident and emergency, emergency medical or surgical services. These are provided at the trust’s two other hospitals located at Scunthorpe and Grimsby. The hospital has approximately 30 inpatient beds as well as day beds providing medical and elective surgical services. There is a midwifery-led outpatient maternity service with a home from home delivery facility and an outpatient’s facility.

We inspected Goole District Hospital (GDH) as part of the comprehensive inspection of Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust, which included this hospital, Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital (DPOW) and Scunthorpe General Hospital (SGH).

We inspected Goole District Hospital on 24 April and 8 May 2014.

We carried out this comprehensive inspection because the Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust was placed in a high risk band 1 in CQC’s Intelligent Monitoring system.

Overall, Goole and District Hospital provided good care in all its services and we found that were safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.

Our key findings were as follows:

  • There were arrangements in place to manage and monitor the prevention and control of infection, with a dedicated team to support staff and ensure policies and procedures were implemented. We found all areas we visited were clean. MRSA and C. difficile rates were within an acceptable range for the size of the trust.
  • There were no significant vacancies with nursing or medical staff. Bank, agency and locum staff were used to fill any deficits in staff numbers. Staff could also work extra hours.
  • Patients were able to access suitable nutrition and hydration including special diets. Patients reported that on the whole they were content with the quality and quantity of food provided.
  • Mortality rates were improving.

We saw some areas where the trust should make improvements.

The trust should:

  • Consider the relocation or refurbishment of the birthing room within the maternity unit at this hospital.
  • Consider a more proactive approach to outpatient waiting times and Did Not Attend (DNA) rates and put plans in place to improve the patient experience.

Professor Sir Mike Richards

Chief Inspector of Hospitals

During a check to make sure that the improvements required had been made

The inspection carried out in February 2013 showed a large number of staff had not received mandatory training, appraisal or clinical supervision. Staff morale was low and staff engagement in problem solving and raising concerns about patient care was inadequate.

We reviewed records relating to training for staff working at Goole Hospital. These showed 85% of staff had completed mandatory training.

Improvements were evident in ensuring staff received personal appraisal. The trust had re-launched appraisal documentation which had been disseminated trust wide and was linked to the trust's visions and values. Plans were in place for 75% of staff to receive appraisal by the end of the year.

The trust had introduced a number of initiatives to improve staff morale. This included reward and recognition for areas of good practice and clinical innovation. Staff engagement was encouraged by the trust. There were opportunities for staff to meet with the Chief Executive and make suggestions. Confidential and closed meetings were provided to staff who wanted to raise concerns. The staff morale survey for September 2013 showed improvements in certain areas such as managerial relationships, training and appraisal. Further work was noted to be required in areas of communication, staff engagement and attitudes and behaviours. Data showed staff morale for Goole was higher compared to the other trust hospital sites.

13 February 2013

During a routine inspection

We inspected the ward that had four beds identified for stroke rehabilitation care. We found that patients who were admitted to the hospital for stroke rehabilitation received care and treatment that met their needs. The hospital had facilities to enable patients to improve their health and wellbeing.

We found that not all staff we spoke with had up to date certificates in training the trust considered mandatory and other important training relevant to their role. There was limited formal staff supervision and not all staff we spoke with had received appropriate development and appraisal. We found the trust had recognised this and started to address it by completing a training analysis.