Archived: Withington Community Hospital

Withington Hospital is one of two locations providing care as part of University Hospitals of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust. It provides a range of hospital services in surgery and outpatient and diagnostic imaging services.

We carried out an announced inspection of Withington Hospital on 26-29 January 2016 as part of our comprehensive inspection of University Hospitals of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust.

Overall, we rated Withington Hospital as ‘Good’. We found that services were provided by dedicated, caring staff and patients were treated with dignity and respect. However, improvements were needed to ensure that services were responsive to people’s needs.

Our key findings were as follows:

• The trust had infection prevention and control policies in place which were accessible to staff.

• We observed good practices in relation to hand hygiene and ‘bare below the elbow’ guidance and the appropriate use of personal protective equipment, such as gloves and aprons, while delivering care.

• Staff received training appropriate to their role however uptake of mandatory training could be improved within outpatients and diagnostic imaging.

• Staffing was good across surgical services but there was a high vacancy rate within the outpatients department.

• Care and treatment was delivered in line with evidence-based practice. Policies and procedures followed recognisable and approved guidelines such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

• Care was delivered with care and compassion by competent staff who worked together as a multi-disciplinary team to provide a comprehensive service to patients.

• Referral to treatment times across the trust for patients awaiting outpatient care was the same or better than the national standard with the exception of September 2015.

However, there were also areas of poor practice where the trust needs to make improvements.

In addition the trust should:

In Surgery:

• Offer staff opportunities to develop surgical nursing competency skills.

• Consider having data available to staff on performance at a local level including local audit activity.

• Increase senior management visibility at Withington treatment centre.

• Cascade to staff the local vision and strategy of the service.

• Provide patient feedback at a local level.

In Outpatient and Diagnostic Imaging Services:

• The trust should ensure access to IT (information technology) services is consistent and reliable to facilitate access to Local Rules and policies and procedures online and mandatory e-learning.

• The trust should ensure documentation relating to radiation faults and Medical Physics are accessible electronically.

• The trust should consider fitting a keypad lock to the clean utility room used to store Urografin in radiology.

• The trust should maintain a record of the maximum and minimum fridge temperatures for each medication fridge and action should be taken if temperatures fall out of the recommended range.

• Staff should have their learning needs identified through the trusts appraisal process.

• The trust should consistently obtain NHS Family and Friends data in the radiology department.

Professor Sir Mike Richards

Chief Inspector of Hospitals