Hospital closed wards after CQC raised patient safety concerns

Two wards at the Priory Hospital in Burgess Hill, West Sussex, were closed by the provider after the CQC carried out an unannounced inspection in May and demanded immediate improvements. The patients in the wards were NHS-funded and some were moved to other Priory hospitals, the provider has confirmed.

The CQC’s head of hospitals inspection Karen Bennett-Wilson said: “We found a number of concerns relating to patient safety on both the Amy Johnson and Michael Shepherd wards and we told the Priory Hospital Burgess Hill it must make urgent improvements. This includes having appropriate systems in place that support staff to keep patients safe.”

The inspection of the Amy Johnson ward, a 10-bedded female personality disorders unit, and the Michael Shepherd ward, a female low secure inpatient unit, found:

• Patients’ physical health was not always attended to with no evidence of neurological observations following head banging or falls, and observations not always carried out when a doctor requested them. Food and fluid intake was not always recorded for patients with eating disorders and there was no evidence that the case of the patient who had not eaten solids for five days had been escalated.
• Not enough experienced and skilled staff to manage all the risks. One ward only had one permanent nurse while the other seven out of eight nurses’ posts were vacant.
• Staff did not always recognise and report patient safety incidents and did not assess and manage risk well.
• High level of restrictive practices on the female personality disorders ward. Some patients felt these were used as a means of punishing them. There was a requirement to attend four meetings a day, with the first starting at 7.30am, and patients were deprived of privileges if they did not attend.

The hospital had been rated as “good” but has now had that classification removed. No new rating will be given until after a full inspection. The provider had placed the hospital on its “watch list” which was meant to trigger extra support and senior leaders had visited but staff said meetings with them “lacked clear direction” and had not been productive.

At the time of the inspection, the hospital had six wards, one of which was closed for refurbishment and only two of the others were inspected. The 10-bedded female psychiatric intensive care ward was closed after the visit in May, although it was not one of those inspected.

The CQC issued two requirement notices after the visit – that staff must be able to access and follow patients’ care plans and risk assessments, and that the provider must ensure effective governance processes in place.

A spokesman for the hospital said: “We take the CQC’s findings very seriously, and we have taken a number of measures to address the issues identified by the inspection. We have reviewed our risk assessment procedures using external clinical quality leads, and Priory’s quality team continues to work with the hospital to ensure that everyone at the site follows best practice. We have reviewed our governance structure around patient feedback and the way we record incidents. We hold monthly lessons learned meetings, and disseminate their findings to all staff. IT issues at the time of the inspection have subsequently been resolved.”