The Huntercombe Hospital Maidenhead has brought in a new leadership team to roll out an urgent action plan following a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection this summer.
The site is a specialist child and adolescent mental health inpatient service (CAMHS) including psychiatric intensive care units (PICU) for young people. On 5 March 2021, Huntercombe Young People Ltd took over the running of the hospital.
Under the ownership of the previous provider, the CQC rated the service as inadequate overall and placed it in special measures.
Shortly after the new provider took over, the CQC conducted a focused inspection of the hospital and served a warning notice requiring it to improve governance and applying conditions to its registration.
The conditions meant that from 25 March, the provider has had to seek written permission from CQC before admitting or readmitting young people to two PICU wards and it must not admit more than 10 people on each ward until further notice.
In July, the CQC carried out the first comprehensive inspection of the service under the new provider and found that it had made improvements meaning the warning notice could be lifted.
However, the conditions imposed remain in place. The hospital is now rated as requires improvement overall, and requires improvement for being safe, effective, responsive and well-led. It was rated good for being caring.
As inspectors found further concerns during the July inspection, the provider was then served with another warning notice for failing to comply with regulations under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 which relate to safe care and treatment, premises and equipment and staffing.
Improvements made but more work required
CQC head of hospital inspection for mental health Karen Bennett-Wilson said it was encouraging to see the new provider had made a number of improvements since taking over in March.
“A new senior leadership team is now in place with the right skills and experience to drive forward the required improvements,” she said.
“Despite only being in post a short amount of time, we saw the positive impact being made by some structured, sustainable changes that have been put in place which have improved staff morale and made services safer, more effective and caring for the young people using them.”
However, Bennett-Wilson added the hospital still had some way to go.
“There are improvements that need to be made to the environment to make it more suitable for the delivery of safe, good quality care,” she said.
“Although young people using the service generally felt that staff were kind and treated them with respect, the service did not always have enough staff with the right skills, qualifications and training to support them, including around safeguarding.
“Some young people with eating disorders told us they didn’t get enough support at mealtimes and that staff often made unhelpful or inappropriate comments about food.”
Bennett-Wilson noted that staff had told the CQC they were under a lot of pressure when undertaking certain procedures and needed more support.
“We have pointed out the improvements that need to be made in our report and have asked the provider to send us an action plan outlining how they intend to address these,” she added.
New leadership team
In response, a spokesperson for The Huntercombe Group said: “We recognised that significant change was needed at our Maidenhead Hospital and recently brought in a new leadership team to roll out an urgent action plan.
“They’ve been working hard and good progress has been made to improve the standard of care at the hospital, which has been recognised by our regulators.
“We will take the outstanding issues raised in the report on board and tackle them as part of our ongoing action plan, which has already resulted in new processes to implement feedback from relatives and patients.
“Our action plan is also focussed on enhanced training programmes for our staff and updating the physical space – our hospital is in an old building that we are continuously modernising and improving.”