- NHS hospital
Northampton General Hospital
Assessment report published 3 March 2026
Contents
Ratings - Medical care (Including older people's care)
Our view of the service
Medical Care (MC) services at Northampton General Hospital are provided by Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust. We carried out this assessment to check the quality of services in response to a Section 29A Warning Notice (WN) we served to the trust in March 2025 following an onsite assessment in February 2025. The WN required the trust to make improvements in relation to the systems and processes to manage effective patient flows and records. At our assessment in February 2025, we rated the MC service as requires improvement overall.
We assessed 4 quality statements across the key questions safe and well-led. These quality statements related to the areas of improvement required in the WN.
Our concerns were with processes and governance issues which could be reviewed remotely. We asked the trust for various documents and assessed them for evidence that improvements had been made.
Following a review of the information provided by the trust, we are satisfied that improvements have been made and the requirements of the WN have been met.
We did not rate this service at this assessment. The previous rating of requires improvement overall remains. We found:
- The introduction of electronic recording and systems had resulted in discharge planning starting earlier in the patient’s journey and reduced reporting errors.
- Processes had been introduced to identify and escalate concerns with patient flow.
- The trust has a strategy to raise awareness of the new discharge processes and promotion with staff.
- Waiting times in the discharge lounge have improved.
- Closer working with stakeholders to introduce a regional wide discharge process.
- Governance metrics have been introduced and reported against. However, at the time of the inspection there was insufficient data collected to evaluate the full impact of the provider’s actions.
- There was evidence of innovative actions such as the inclusion of the transport manager at daily discharge meetings, a dedicated ‘discharge doctor’ and the introduction of a trusted assessor.
Whilst improvements had been made, managers recognised continued improvements were required to fully embed and maintain the changes overtime. We are monitoring the progress of improvements to services and will re-inspect them as appropriate.
People's experience of this service
The trust’s October board meeting reported that patient experience data remained high and continued to improve each month between April-June. The latest (August 25) Family and Friends Test data reported an increase in satisfaction from the previous month (91.1%). Several transfers had taken place to move patients waiting over 52 weeks resulting in patients being treated quicker overall.
The trust reported that action since the warning notice had resulted in an increase in positive trends in discharge timeliness and patient outcomes. The average time of day that patients were discharged had moved earlier. In August–October 2025, internal data showed an increase in the percentage of daily discharges happening before 5:00pm, compared to the previous quarter. This suggests fewer patients ready for discharge were having to wait for paperwork or medicines late into the evening. An increase in morning discharges had also been noted. The trust reported that exact figures are pending final audit, however early analysis indicated a 5–10% increase in discharges before midday, partly attributable to faster Electronic Discharge Notes (EDN) and Treatment to Take Out (TTO) processing, supported by better discharge planning via electronic Patient Records (EPR) and changes to ward processes.