Walsall Healthcare comes out of special measures

Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust has come out of special measures following its latest inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The inspectorate has rated care as ‘Outstanding’ across the trust and has highlighted a number of areas of outstanding practice in both the hospital and community, emphasising the progress the trust has made in continuing improvement, creating a positive culture and promoting innovative ideas as key to the turn-a-round.

While the trust has been rated as Requires Improvement overall, there has been significant progress made since it was rated Inadequate in 2016 and Requires Improvement in 2017.

The CQC detailed the areas which need to improve including ensuring staffing levels are safe and reduce the risk of patient harm, greater engagement with patients and better monitoring of infection risk.

Under the well-led domain, while stating that leaders were well engaged with external partnerships to secure experiences and quality across health and care, inspectors noted that staff below director level could do more to ensure accountability and the flow of information.

The trust also got a long way to go in making the most effective use of its estate and staff and will be picking this up through its improvement programme, which has been developed with staff, to focus on the trust’s vision of achieving an Outstanding CQC rating by 2022.

Richard Beeken, chief executive of the trust, said: “Today is an incredibly proud day for all of us at Walsall Healthcare because the effort, commitment and pride that our staff have demonstrated throughout three CQC inspections in as many years has obviously made a huge impact.

“They should take the majority of the credit for the trust being able to come out of special measures as they have driven the changes that have shown the CQC that we deliver safe, high-quality care and that patients in Walsall can have confidence in the services we provide. We know that we’re on an improvement journey and that there is still work to do, but our ambition is to become a trust that is rated outstanding overall by 2022 and together we’re confident of achieving this.”