- NHS hospital
Northampton General Hospital
We served a warning notice on Northampton General Hospital on 21 March 2025 for failing to meet the regulations related to safe care and treatment in the emergency department due to overcrowding and because significant improvement was required to improve patient flow through the hospital.
Report from 29 October 2024 assessment
Ratings
Our view of the service
Northampton General Hospital (NGH) provides general acute services for a population of 426,500 in West Northamptonshire and hyper-acute stroke, vascular and renal services to people living throughout the whole of Northamptonshire. The hospital is also an accredited cancer centre and provides cancer services to a wider population of 880,000 who live in Northamptonshire and parts of Buckinghamshire. We rated this service under our previous methodology in February 2023 , where it was rated requires improvement overall. As part of this assessment, we visited The Head and Neck ward, part of the trust's surgical division, which provided post operative surgical care . We visited on 6 March 2024 to check suitable care, equipment and processes were in place to reduce the risk of patients falling. This assessment was prompted by information we held about this service. We assessed a total of 9 quality statements. We looked at all the quality statements under the key questions, Safe, Effective and Well-led. At the last inspection, the surgery service was rated good. During this assessment, we found the service had suitable safeguards in place to reduce the risk of patients falling. However, we raised concerns with the provider about ward layout, discrepancies between care plans and how care was being provided and process in place to monitor compliance with the service's falls prevention policies. After our assessment the service’s rating remained the same.