CQC issues Warning Notice to Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust

Published: 1 September 2017 Page last updated: 3 November 2022
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The Care Quality Commission has told Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust that it must make significant improvements in the care of patients at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

CQC has issued a Warning Notice requiring the trust to improve care and ensure patient safety and confidentiality throughout the trust.

Inspectors visited the trust in July 2017 to check progress in meeting requirements that had been identified on a previous inspection in January 2017.

On the latest inspection, CQC found a number of issues including:

  • There were not always enough staff with the skills, knowledge and experience to meet patients’ needs.
  • There were not sufficient numbers of specialist children’s nurses to meet the needs of children and young people in the emergency department at all times.
  • Ophthalmology and cardiology had increasing waiting lists and patient demand.
  • There were high levels of delayed and out of hours patient discharges from the critical care unit
  • The hospital did not have effective systems and processes in place to ensure that confidentiality was maintained at all times.

Mary Cridge, CQC Head of Hospital Inspection (south west) said:

“We have told Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust that it must deliver significant and sustainable improvements to the quality of care that it provides to patients throughout the trust by 30 November 2017.

“The trust will get a full and detailed report following their inspection but ahead of that we wanted to be really clear about the issues that need to be urgently addressed. We will publish further details of our findings during October.

“In the meantime we will continue to monitor the service and return at a later date to check that satisfactory improvements have been made.”

We have told Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust that it must deliver significant and sustainable improvements to the quality of care that it provides to patients throughout the trust by 30 November 2017

Mary Cridge, CQC Head of Hospital Inspection (south west)

About the Care Quality Commission

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.

We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve.

We monitor, inspect and regulate services to make sure they meet fundamental standards of quality and safety and we publish what we find to help people choose care.