- NHS hospital
New Cross Hospital
Assessment report published 27 March 2026
Contents
Ratings - Urgent and emergency services
Our view of the service
We carried out this inspection as part of the Urgent and Emergency Care Winter Pathway programme. We inspected the Emergency Department (ED) on 24 to 26 November 2025.
We inspected 25 quality statements across the safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led key questions and have combined the scores for these areas with scores from the last inspection to give the rating.
The service was in breach of the legal regulations relating to safe care and treatment, dignity and respect, and governance. Key issues included delays in triage, poor oversight of the waiting room, poor flow through the department, insufficient staffing levels to maintain safe care, poor safety culture, lack of learning from incidents and audits and poor pathways, including into the same day emergency care (SDEC) area. We issued the service with a letter of intent for possible urgent enforcement action on 2 December 2025 and issued a further letter of intent on 4 December 2025 as further questions needed answering. We received a response on 5 December 2025 which provided an action plan and reassurance that mitigations had been taken to reduce the risk of harm to patients.
People's experience of this service
Patients and any family or carers with them were mostly negative about the care they had received. We were told that staff treated them with kindness but did not have time to effectively care for them. We saw some good examples of care and all staff we spoke with were caring but they did not have time to do their jobs effectively due to high volumes of patients and not enough staff to complete the tasks.
Records showed patients were not always given the tests they needed promptly, and at times they did not feel staff were on hand if they needed them for help or support.