The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has again rated acute wards for adults of working age and psychiatric intensive care units at Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust as requires improvement following an inspection in January.
Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust provides a wide range of specialist mental and physical health services to a population within Lancashire and South Cumbria. The trust has 25 registered locations which provide inpatient and community care.
The inspection was carried out in response to concerns received about serious incidents within the service. Inspectors visited 21 wards across eight locations.
Following the inspection, the overall rating for the service, as well as the areas of safe and effective are rated as requires improvement again. Caring and responsive are rated as good again and well-led has gone up from requires improvement to good.
The overall rating for Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust remains as good.
Inspectors found:
- Staff completed risk assessments for each patient on admission using a recognised tool and reviewed this regularly.
- Staff knew how to recognise people at risk of or suffering harm and worked with other agencies to protect them.
- Staff reported serious incidents clearly and in line with trust policy.
- Managers had implemented new training programmes to ensure staff conducted searches appropriately to ensure nothing unsafe could be brought into wards.
- New protocols had been implemented at Chorley ward to improve discharge procedures.
- Staff knew about any potential ligature anchor points and mitigated the risks to keep people safe.
- Not all patients had access to a psychologist, and whilst physical health care plans were generally good, one patient who had an underlying health need that was not being monitored.
- Managers didn’t always ensure that staff were inducted prior to working on the wards.
- The trust had improvement projects underway across all wards such as self-harm, and violence and aggression reduction.
The report will be published on CQC’s website in the next few days.