Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust receives ‘warning notice’ from CQC

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has told Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust that it must make significant improvements in the care of patients at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

Inspectors visited the trust in July 2017 to check progress in meeting requirements that had been identified on a previous inspection in January 2017.

CQC issued a ‘warning notice’ requiring the trust to improve care and ensure patient safety and confidentiality throughout the trust.

On the latest inspection, CQC found a number of issues including: lack of staff with the skills, knowledge and experience to meet patients’ needs; not enough sufficient numbers of specialist children’s nurses to meet the needs of children and young people in the emergency department at all times; ophthalmology and cardiology had increasing waiting lists and patient demand; there were high levels of delayed and out of hours patient discharges from the critical care unit; and the hospital did not have effective systems and processes in place to ensure that confidentiality was maintained at all times.

Mary Cridge, CQC Head of Hospital Inspection (south west), said: “We have told Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust that it must deliver significant and sustainable improvements to the quality of care that it provides to patients throughout the trust by 30 November 2017.

“The trust will get a full and detailed report following their inspection but ahead of that we wanted to be really clear about the issues that need to be urgently addressed. We will publish further details of our findings during October.

“In the meantime we will continue to monitor the service and return at a later date to check that satisfactory improvements have been made.”