CQC Inspection – Letter from our Chief Executive
Dear families,
We are writing to you today to let you know about the significant improvements we are making to our children’s services, and to apologise if you or your loved ones have not had the best care or experience when using our these services.
Our children’s services were recently inspected by the Care Quality Commission and today its report rated our services as inadequate. You can read the report here: Kettering General Hospital (cqc.org.uk)
We would like to apologise to any families who have felt let down by the care they have received. We realise we haven’t offered the best experience to every family, and this is not good enough – we are truly sorry.
We were asked by inspectors to make a number of improvements, and immediately after the inspection in December we set about making both urgent and on-going improvements. We want to reassure you that, while some of these improvements will take time, our services are safe and our friendly teams are here for you if you have any questions or concerns while in our care.
We would like to thank our teams who have already worked incredibly hard to make immediate improvements, while continuing to offer the best care possible to those using our services. We will continue to support and work alongside them and the new leadership team within the service to ensure all of the changes that are required are made. The hospital Board is focused on ensuring these improvements both happen and are embedded. Since the inspection we have already:
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moved our Paediatric Emergency Department – which was under considerable space pressure – to a new larger area next to our adult Emergency Department (* this move was made at the end of January. Our Paediatric ED now occupies an area formerly occupied by our Medical Same Day Emergency Care Unit.)
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addressed core safe staffing levels in children’s services with a new monitoring process which enables staffing levels to be adjusted quickly and appropriately. We have also recruited to our children’s services teams,and new appointments include two new paediatric consultants and a new Head of Nursing
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developed a strong focus on key safety processes such as sepsis management with a senior nurse driving improvement. We have delivered additional training and increased the frequency with which we check that staff are following our sepsis procedures. Recent checks have showed we are now achieving 100% for initial sepsis screening across all areas.
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given more attention to fluid monitoring – with recent checks now showing 100% compliance for fluid and hydration chart completion and initial assessment on Skylark Ward
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given additional focus to identifying the deterioration of patients. Recent checks on vital signs assessments show we are now doing them at the right frequency 95% of the time. Vital signs assessments are where staff measure a patient’s temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation. They are used to help determine a patient’s condition and can help spot any deterioration in it.
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improved medicines management – We have reviewed how we managed medicines and, for example, made sure we check trolleys used to store medicines more regularly and robustly to prevent medicines becoming out-of-date - consistently achieving 100% compliance in recent checks.
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improved safeguarding – The CQC recognised that the Trust’s ‘staff had training on how to recognise and report abuse and they knew how to apply it’ and ‘worked well with other agencies to do so’ – but found we needed to do more to protect children with mental health conditions. We are taking practical measures to ensure our ward is safe for all our patients.
There is more to do, and we will continue to work with our teams, and listen to those families using our services to ensure we are offering the best care possible to our communities.
We’d like to thank you for your support while we make these important changes to our children’s and young people’s services, we are fully committed to ensuring we provide a safe service and a good experience for all our patients and their families.
Kind regards,
Deborah Needham, CEO
Trevor Shipman, Chair