Improvements in safety needed at city’s hospitals – watchdog

Staff shortages, especially a lack of doctors in evenings and weekends in elderly care, children’s and surgical wards, were highlighted by officials from the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

A 70-strong team visited Leeds General Infirmary and St James’s Hospital as part of the organisations’s new regime of in-depth inspections.

A report published today says both require improvement, while the city’s smaller hospitals - Chapel Allerton and Seacroft in Leeds and Wharfedale in Otley - were rated as ‘good’.

England’s chief inspector of hospitals, Prof Sir Mike Richards, said a change in leadership at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust had led to a rise in confidence.

“However I am concerned that shortages of doctors and nurses in some areas may affect patient care. While there have been moves to improve the recruitment process, this needs to be given greater priority,” he added.

“While we found staff to be caring and compassionate, we also found that opportunities to improve the safety culture and quality of services were missed as good practice and learning from incidents was not always shared as it should.”

A team which included doctors, nurses, NHS managers and members of the public spent several days in the city in March.

Today’s report ranked A&E, end of life care, maternity and outpatients services as good, but medical care, surgery, critical care and children’s and young people’s services all required improvement.

It said at LGI and St James’s there were “inadequate levels of staff, both nursing and medical in some areas, particularly out of hours’ medical cover and anaesthetist availability”.

The report added: “Nurse staffing levels on the children’s wards were identified as a risk and regularly fell below expected minimum levels, which placed staff under increased stress and pressure.”

Hospitals were found to be clean, with caring staff, and patients were generally positive. There was also praise for nine areas of outstanding practice, including a specialist eye clinic, the Disablement Service Centre at Seacroft Hospital and work to prevent unnecessary admissions to hospital of older people.

But trust managers were told improvements must be made in 15 areas, including to “ensure there are sufficient qualified and experienced nursing and medical staff particularly on the medical elderly care wards children’s wards and surgical wards, including anaesthetist availability and medical cover out of hours and weekends.”

Julian Hartley, chief executive of Leeds Teaching Hospitals, said: “We welcome the detailed feedback provided by this report, in particular that across all of our hospitals, services are caring and effective. We are pleased that the inspectors recognise the constructive steps we have already taken, such as investing in more clinical staff, and having dedicated safeguarding arrangements.

“We acknowledge there are areas in which we still need to make progress more quickly and we have plans in place to make this happen but the improvements we have already made are good foundations on which to build.”

He said they were taking action including employing more than 400 new nurses from September and ensuring all staff were up to date with training.