SERIOUS concerns have been raised over safety levels at two local hospitals after a wide-ranging watchdog inspection.
The Care Quality Commission gave North Manchester General Hospital and Royal Oldham Hospital the worst possible rating for safety in a report out today following a 12-day inspection in February and March.
Inspectors criticised standards in A&E as well as maternity, high-dependency, critical care and children and young people’s units.
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Fairfield General Hospital in Bury was given a 'requires improvement' rating, with most criticism related to delayed patient discharges.
The hospital's ability to put patients on single-sex wards, but the most strongly worded criticism was reserved for North Manchester and Royal Oldham.
Trust leaders say new management took charge immediately after the inspection ended and set about putting in place a wide range of improvement measures.
An improvement board featuring chiefs of Bury Council, Bury Clinical Commissioning Group and other authorities will now meet regularly to oversee how those changes take effect.
You can read the trust's full response to the report - and three other articles about the inspection - in separate news stories elsewhere on this website.
The 63-page report tells a story of understaffing, leading to problems that some staff did not have the confidence to report – or did not understand the importance of sticking to regulations.
In one case, CQC monitors had to tell staff during the inspection that failings need to be reported, such as the inappropriate storage of medication.
While locum and agency staff were brought in, they were sometimes not given inductions to understand hospital policies, and their performance was not monitored.
North Manchester routinely missed targets for treating patients within four hours and for making care decisions within 12 hours.
Allegations have also been made that records relating to these targets was not reliable and an investigation is underway to establish if there was an attempt to cheat the targets.
The report says: “Patients were subject to delays for unacceptable lengths of time.
“There were times that, due to bed capacity, patients were placed in areas not best suited to their needs.”
In some cases, patients were moved in the middle of the night to another wards when there was no clinical need.
People remained in hospital longer than they needed to and there were examples of patient delays.
In a quarter of all the shifts the CQC analysed, there were not enough nurses on duty in the North Manchester maternity ward and paediatric nurses lacked approved life-support training.
The report adds: “There was an unacceptable level of serious incidents with delays in investigations.”
“We found examples where (bosses) had been made aware of risks and had failed to address them.
“Opportunities to identify and apply learning to prevent recurrence were also missed.
“This was the case despite staff training and trust-wide publications to support staff learning and improvement in relation to incident management and patient safety.”
Visit cqc.org.uk/provider/RW6 to read the full report.
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