- NHS hospital
St Peter's Hospital
Assessment report published 30 July 2025
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment:20 March 2024 . St Peter’s Hospital, part of Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Foundation Trust, provides a range of NHS hospital services. This assessment looked at Medical care services due to concerns relating to the delivery of patient care. The scores for our assessment have been combined with scores based on the key question ratings from the last inspection. Though the assessment of some of the quality statements indicated some areas of concern, our overall rating remains good. The rating from medical care has been combined with ratings of the other services from the last inspections. See our previous reports to get a full picture of all other services at St Peter’s Hospital. The rating of St Peter’s Hospital remains requires improvement. In our assessment of medical care services we found the care we observed was safe and patients were positive about their experiences. However, we found breaches of the regulations for safe care and treatment. Planned versus actual nursing staffing did not always match, due to short notice sickness absence. Patient records showed unwitnessed falls and medicine errors that could be attributed to low nurse staffing and skill mix, along with reported lapses in personal care such as nutrition and promoting mobility. While the division had established governance processes appropriate for their service, Staff expressed concerns of a lack of an open safety culture within the trust and told us safety was not always a top priority for trust Leaders. There was a new executive leadership team in place at the time of our visit. Some staff said they did not feel confident to raise concerns and felt this was adversely affecting the work of the division. A number of senior staff expressed worry about a lack of a clear vision and organisational strategy to guide priorities. Senior trust leadership had recognised these problems, and the trust chairperson had asked for an independent review shortly before our assessment visit. We saw evidence of initial actions undertaken by the executive team in response to the report recommendations.