The NHS watchdog has ordered a troubled hospital trust to urgently overhaul patient safety or face sanctions weeks after two patients died after enduring long waits on trolleys in a corridor.
The Care Quality Commission has given Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust six weeks to make significant improvements at the three hospitals it runs in Worcester, Redditch and Kidderminster.
The regulator has served the trust with a section 29A notice, which sets out changes it must make by 10 March or risk penalties such as a special administrator being brought in to start running it.
Caragh Merrick, the trust’s chair, admitted to staff in an email after the CQC’s move that the trust had “lost sight of the basics [of caring for patients]. As staff we must all be held accountable for our actions,” she added.
Previous lapses means that from now action to improve patient safety will be taken from “the ward to the board” in an attempt to “guarantee consistent high professional standards”, said Merrick.
The trust was in the headlines recently when two patients died, reportedly on 1 and 3 January, in the A&E unit at the Worcestershire Royal hospital in Worcester when it was struggling to cope with the sheer number of patients needing care.
In one of the cases, a female patient on an emergency trolley in a corridor within A&E suffered an aneurysm and died later in a resuscitation bay. The second patient died after suffering a cardiac arrest on another A&E trolley within the department after waiting 35 hours for a ward bed elsewhere in the hospital.
The trust was put into special measures in December 2015 after CQC inspectors raised concerns about safety in its A&E, children’s care, and maternity and gynaecology services.
It was embroiled in another controversy last year when CQC staff found that 10,000 patients’ x-rays had not been assessed, which prompted concern that serious illnesses had been missed.
Worcestershire Royal hospital recently became so busy that it had to divert A&E patients to its sister Alexandra hospital in Redditch during the NHS “winter crisis”.
The trust is due to end 2016-17 with a deficit of £37.5m, down significantly on its £59m overspend in 2015-16.
A major consultation to shake up healthcare at the trust’s hospitals is under way.
Worcestershire’s three NHS clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) launched the consultation in January which, if the option proposed was picked, would move many planned operations to the Alexandra, but concentrate most emergency care at the main Worcester hospital.
More day-case and short-stay surgery would go to the county’s smaller Kidderminster hospital.
Worcestershire hospitals trust ordered to urgently improve patient safety
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