Imperial Trust - Dr Tracey Batten response to the CQC report

Dear Partner

Care Quality Commission inspection report

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) today publishes its reports on its inspection of our Trust and I

wanted to make sure you were aware of the findings and to share our response with you straight away.

Background

The CQC inspection of our Trust took place from 2 until 5 September 2014. The CQC is the

independent regulator of health and social care in England.

The new CQC inspection methodology saw a large team of inspectors from various professional and

lay backgrounds visit four of the Trust’s hospital sites and a number of departments, wards and

clinics. (As a specialist eye hospital, the Western Eye Hospital was not included in this inspection.)

The inspectors reviewed documents, checked premises and equipment, observed how we deliver

care and talked to staff, stakeholders and patients.

Eight key service areas were inspected:

 A&E

 Medical care

 Surgery

 Critical care

 Maternity and family planning

 Children and young people

 End of life care

 Outpatients

For each of these eight areas, the inspectors provide a rating for each of their five ‘domains’ of quality.

They also used the domains to rate the Trust and the four hospitals inspected overall. The domains

are:

 Safe

 Effective

 Caring

 Responsive

 Well-led

Our ratings

Overall, the Trust was rated as ‘requires improvement’. In terms of the CQC’s five ‘domains’, we were rated as ‘good’ for being effective and caring but as ‘requires improvement’ for being safe, responsive and well-led. In terms of the eight service areas that were assessed, two were rated as ‘good’ across all the sites where they are delivered - maternity and family planning services and end-of-life care. Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital was rated as ‘good’ overall while Charing Cross,
Hammersmith and St Mary’s hospitals were all rated as ‘requires improvement’.

You can get more on the detailed findings and see what the Trust is doing in response to the CQC’s reports by visiting our website

Response and next steps

While we are disappointed with our overall rating of ‘requires improvement’, we think the report is
extremely constructive. It clearly sets out our challenges while also recognising the positive impact of
our work over the past year and highlighting the great care that we already provide.

We acknowledge that there are a few areas, such as cleanliness in St Mary’s A&E, that have simply
not been acceptable and there can be no excuse for that. But I want to assure you that this is the
exception and that we have acted immediately on the most pressing issues raised. For example, we
have already put in extra staff support and refurbished the A&E at St Mary’s Hospital – with new
flooring and lighting, more sinks and additional cleaning rotas.

The CQC has now re-inspected St Mary’s A&E and has confirmed that the required improvements
have been made.

Overall, the findings show that our major improvement programmes – such as speeding up our
recruitment processes, investing in better patient administration and IT systems, making care
pathways more patient centred and building staff leadership and engagement – are moving us in the
right direction. It is clear that we now have to redouble our efforts in a number of areas and services.

The report also shows that there is a lot of great care and clinical practice that we can build on. Most
importantly, our staff are consistently seen by patients as caring and compassionate. And we achieve
some of the best results for our patients, including in our specialist centres for stroke and major
trauma, as well as one of the lowest rates of patient deaths in the whole of the country.

We have already begun work on an action plan in response to the CQC report, which is due to be
submitted in mid January. We hope to work closely over the coming months with our partners and
stakeholders, and especially with patients and local communities, to move all of our ratings to ‘good’
and ultimately to ‘outstanding’. Our initial action plan will be presented at our next public Trust Board meeting on Wednesday 28 January 2015.

Please contact mick.fisher3@imperial.nhs.uk  if you require any further information.

Yours sincerely

Dr Tracey Batten

Chief Executive