Trust subject to further enforcement action

The edict was issued by Monitor following an investigation that concluded the mental health and community trust should speed improvements to the quality of its care.

Following the Monitor report, the trust was issued with a further warning notice from the Care Quality Commission. A previous enforcement notice was issued last November after commission inspectors found its Headington site to be in breach of six essential standards.

Monitor said that the trust, which provides services across Hampshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, must improve the way it manages its services to ensure problems pinpointed by the CQC were not repeated elsewhere.

Problems unearthed by the CQC at the trust’s learning disability services in its Slade House site in Oxfordshire led Monitor, the sector regulator, to open an investigation last December.

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.”

Trust chief executive Katrina Percy said: “Today the health sector regulator, Monitor has announced its decision to take enforcement action against Southern Health.

“We have been under investigation by Monitor following a Care Quality Commission inspection at our learning disability inpatient unit at Slade House in Oxford in September 2013.”

“We have agreed with Monitor that we need to do a number of things to demonstrate improvements,” she added. “These are: deliver our improvement plan for our learning disability services; address the action plans for CQC warning notices across all of our services; and deliver improvements in our quality governance and board governance.”