‘Good’ result for St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust
The CQC has published its first reports on the inspection at St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust at St George’s Hospital, Queen Mary’s Hospital and St John’s Therapy Centre.
The CQC found the overall standard of care to be ‘good’ across all sites and awarded St George’s NHS Healthcare NHS Trust an overall ‘good’ rating, with some aspects of care rated as ‘outstanding’.
The CQC rated 62 specific services. Out of these, four were rated ‘outstanding’, 50 were ‘good’ and eight were in the ‘requires improvement’ category. Not one of our services was judged ‘inadequate’.
| Summaries and full reports are available via this link: |
In February 2014 the trust was subject to a very rigorous inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), carried out under their new inspection regime which focused on five questions: ‘are services safe, caring, effective, responsive and well led?’
The inspection covered St George’s and Queen Mary’s hospitals, St John’s Therapy Centre and some community sites. Overall there were 40-50 inspectors onsite at one time for a one week period with unannounced follow up visits. The inspectors included national and local independent experts, such as clinical consultants, directors of nursing and chief executives of other hospitals. The team also included members of the public.
As well as observing care in practice, inspectors spoke to staff in focus groups, patients and our key stakeholders for their views on services and the care and experience provided and held a public listening event.
Chief executive Miles Scott said: “Well done and thank you to everyone whose hard work helped the trust achieve this rating. It’s great news that the quality of the care we provide has been recognised
“The result is great in terms of what it does for our position amongst London’s leading hospitals. It provides assurance that we offer high standards of clinical services to our local community and beyond and that we remain true to our values to provide excellence across clinical care, education and research, which ultimately means better care for all our patients.
“I am delighted to see that some of our services are recognised as being outstanding such as critical and intensive care.”
He added: “It is great news, not just for us but women thinking about where to have their babies, to read this comment in the CQC report: “The maternity service provided safe, effective, responsive and well-led services to women. The care delivered was considered to be outstanding”.
Intensive and critical care services at St George’s Hospital, where patients received safe, effective and responsive care from specialist staff on a 24-hour basis, were rated as ‘Outstanding’ by inspectors.
Inspectors found a number of other areas of good practice across the trust, including:
- Excellent multidisciplinary working, communication across teams, and relationship building with patients across community services.
- The leadership of intensive care unit and high dependency unit services with open and effective team working and a priority given to information, research and training.
- Maternity care, due to information provided to women, robust midwifery staffing levels and access to specialist midwives.
- The provision of a comforting environment within the mortuary suite.
- The hyper-acute stroke unit on William Drummond Ward.
- The provision of advice at Queen Mary’s Hospital minor injuries unit.
- The neonatal special care baby unit.
- Multi-professional team working in neurology theatres.
- The local leadership of Richmond acute medical unit.
CQC’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards, said: “We identified a great deal of good practice in this trust – most notably in the critical care service at St George’s Hospital which we rated as Outstanding, and from which I am sure other trusts could learn. Patients and their relatives using that service felt that the care was of a high standard, and that they had been involved in decisions about treatment.
“We’ve rated this trust as ‘good’ overall. Staff told us that they felt proud to work in the trust, that they felt engaged, and most felt enabled to raise concerns.
“While our findings here were generally positive, there were some improvements the trust must make. This includes making sure that staff gain a better understanding of how to support people with limited capacity. The trust has told us they will take action – and we’ll return in due course to make sure that they have done so.”
Queen Mary’s Hospital, St John’s Therapy Centre and the trust’s community sites were some of the first community service environments in the country to be inspected under the model. Queen Mary’s Hospital was rated as ‘good’ across the three services offered at that site.
The CQC is not yet rating community services, therefore the St John’s Therapy Centre and the community inpatient service at Queen Mary’s Hospital have not been rated.
| Summaries and full reports are available via this link: |
Notes to editors
For more information, please contact the communications team on 020 8725 5151 or email communications@stgeorges.nhs.uk
Outside working hours, please page us by calling 0844 822 2888, leaving a short message and contact details for pager SG548.
About St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust
St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is the largest healthcare provider in south west London. Its main site, St George’s Hospital in Tooting – one of the country’s principal teaching hospitals – is shared with St George’s, University of London, which trains medical students and carries out advanced medical research. As well as acute hospital services, the trust provides a wide variety of specialist and community hospital based care and a full range of community services to children, adults, older people and people with learning disabilities. These services are provided from Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, 11 health centres and clinics, schools and nurseries, patients’ homes and Wandsworth Prison.
About the Care Quality Commission (CQC)
The role of the CQC is to make sure that hospitals, care homes, dental and general practices and other care services in England provide people with safe, effective and high-quality care, and we encourage them to make improvements.
The CQC does this in the following ways:
- Setting standards of quality and safety that people have a right to expect whenever they receive care.
- Registering care services that meet its standards.
- Monitoring, inspecting and regulating care services to make sure that they continue to meet the standards.
- Protecting the rights of vulnerable people, including those whose rights are restricted under the Mental Health Act.
- Listening to and acting on patient experiences.
- Involving the public and people who receive care in our work and working in partnership with other organisations and local groups.
- Challenging all providers, with the worst performers getting the most attention.
- Making fair and authoritative judgements, supported by the best information and evidence.
- Taking appropriate action if care services are failing to meet the standards.
- Carrying out in-depth investigations to look at care across the system.
- Reporting on the quality of care services, publishing clear and comprehensive information, including performance ratings to help people choose care.
| Summaries and full reports are available via this link: |
