East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust’s Colchester General Hospital has been rated as requiring improvement again, but many of the problems are outside its control.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has again rated medical care and urgent and emergency services at Colchester General Hospital as “requires improvement”.
CQC carried out these inspections in part due to safeguarding concerns and emerging safety risks for people receiving care at the hospital, run by East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust.
“When we inspected Colchester Hospital, we continued to find concerns about how people were cared for. Some of these are the same concerns we’ve already highlighted at previous inspections. We’ve also found new concerns about the deterioration in the safety of these two services in particular,” said Hazel Roberts, CQC deputy director of operations in the East of England.
The report is of particular concern as it reflects problems going back to 2013 when the CQC recommended that the hospital be put under special measures.
In July 2016, for example, CQC’s chief inspector of hospitals, Mike Richards, said that he hadn’t found “the degree of improvement we would have wanted to see or the level of care we feel people should be able to expect”.
Overwhelmed staff
In the latest report, the CQC found that leaders didn’t always investigate incidents in a timely way – CQC said that it saw 40 overdue reviews at this inspection. This meant a delay in identifying learning and implementing changes in practice.
Staff didn’t always follow infection prevention and control procedures and didn’t always detect and control the risk of it spreading; leaders didn’t always support staff, who didn’t always follow national guidance when using restraint, and de-escalation planning was poor; medical staff missed training targets for basic life support, safeguarding and other key areas; and the hospital wasn’t always managing medicines well, which meant people weren’t consistently receiving them safely and medicines were not always kept secure.
Roy Lilley, publisher of NHSManagers.net, describes the rating as “less a scandal about Colchester and more a snapshot of a system under relentless strain”.
As he points out, the hospital was opened in 1985 to serve a population of about 130,000. It now serves probably more than 200,000, “at least a 50%, maybe 60% increase”, outpacing the regional average population growth.
He has a point. The report finds that people are cared for in corridors but are not always checked on regularly. It also says that there aren’t enough staff to meet care needs consistently.
