24.04.14
Southern Health must ‘significantly’ improve safety of services
Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust must significantly improve its compliance with regards to quality of care across its learning disability services, or face further formal action from regulator Monitor.
The trust has agreed with Monitor deliver an improvement plan across its learning disability services; address the action plans for Care Quality Commission (CQC) warning notices across all of its services; and deliver improvements in its quality governance and Board governance.
Southern Health has been under investigation by Monitor following a CQC inspection at its learning disability inpatient unit at Slade House in Oxford in September 2013. This highlighted that the service was not providing the standard of care patients should expect.
Monitor's investigation has found that the trust must act faster to improve the quality of care in Oxfordshire and must improve the way it manages its services to make sure the problems identified by CQC cannot be repeated elsewhere.
Katrina Percy, chief executive of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Monitor’s role is to protect the interests of patients, and we take their concerns extremely seriously. Over the coming weeks our focus will be on ensuring we make the improvements needed, to reassure both Monitor and our patients and their families about the quality of care we provide across all of our services day in, day out.
“Since Monitor’s investigation began, three warning notices at Slade House have been removed, and work to improve our learning disability services in Oxfordshire continues. I fully understand why Monitor has raised their concerns and I welcome the opportunity to work with them to demonstrate that the issues they have identified are not an ongoing cause for concern.”
The trust, which provides mental health and community services across southern England, including Hampshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, has been issued with another warning notice from CQC today. The CQC found that Southern Health’s Evenlode unit in Oxford was unsafe after an incident in which a man was found unconscious with a ligature around his neck. The trust was also found not to have taken action to prevent such incidents happening again.
Paul Streat, regional director at Monitor, said: “The trust has failed to act quickly enough to improve services in Oxfordshire and must get the right processes in place to ensure action is taken to fix problems quickly."
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