Trust continues to provide good quality health and care

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust continues to provide good quality health and care services, according to the trust’s new performance rating by the Care Quality Commission.

In this year’s annual health check, Northamptonshire Healthcare has received a “good” rating for the quality of the services it provides and an “excellent” rating for the way it uses its resources to deliver value for money.

The trust’s excellent rating for financial management is based on the Auditor’s Local Evaluation, in which the Audit Commission has named Northamptonshire Healthcare best performing trust in England for 2009.

Under quality, Northamptonshire Healthcare achieved 10 of the 12 national targets relating to the mental health, learning disability, sexual health, and drug alcohol services provided by the trust, and all but two of the 44 national core standards.

Key targets met by the trust include:

• Ensuring patients on the care programme approach are followed up within seven days of being discharged from hospital.
• Ensuring patients who are ready to be discharged from hospital can leave without delay, and with appropriate ongoing care and support.
• A good rating by patients for our inpatient services in the 2009 patient survey.
• Supporting more than 1,000 drug users to continue treatment for at least 12 weeks.
• Ensuring patients with complex mental health problems are allocated a care co-ordinator when they are discharged from hospital.
• Providing a comprehensive child and adolescent mental health service.
• Making sure we have accurate and up-to-date information about all our patients, including their ethnic group.
• Ensuring that patients are assessed by crisis resolution teams before being admitted to hospital.
• Our work to improve levels of staff satisfaction.

The trust also met all the important national core standards covering clinical and cost effectiveness, focusing on patients, accessible and responsive care, the care environment, and public health.

Ron Shields, chief executive of Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust said: “We are very satisfied with this year’s result, which clearly demonstrates the high standard of overall care that our services provide for patients and service users.

“We will, of course, be working hard to regain our ‘excellent’ rating for quality, but our staff, service users and partners can still be very proud of what they have achieved.

“The process of improving services relies on good quality feedback and the Care Quality Commission’s assessment has provided valuable information about areas we can focus on quickly to make a difference.”

In the assessment, Northamptonshire Healthcare missed two of the national targets. One target relates to discharge plans for clients with learning disabilities who will be moving from NHS properties into the community in 2010.

In 2010, clients with learning disabilities will be moving from properties owned and run by Northamptonshire Healthcare into new homes in the community. Northamptonshire Healthcare, Northamptonshire Teaching Primary Care Trust and Northamptonshire County Council are continuing to plan for this change.

The trust has worked closely with clients and their families to prepare their discharge plans, which set out the levels of care and support and their preferences for the new services that the county council and PCT will be commissioning for them from new service providers.

At this stage, the final detail of those new services is not yet available, which is why the Care Quality Commission has assessed clients’ discharge plans as incomplete.

The second relates to best practice in mental health services for people with a learning disability.

Currently, mental health treatment and care for people with learning disabilities in Northamptonshire focuses on the specialist inpatient and community learning disability services that the trust provides.

In line with best practice, the trust is now beginning to develop its services to ensure that people with learning disabilities can more easily and appropriately use mainstream psychiatric services when they need them.

The trust will also be strengthening two of its procedures following this year’s assessment by the Care Quality Commission: the records management policy, which relates to patient records and other key documents owned by the trust, and the patient safety alert system, which ensures that important notices from the National Patient Safety Agency and other bodies are cascaded to appropriate staff and acted upon.

The Care Quality Commission gave the trust’s records management policy a clean bill of health regarding protecting confidentiality and ensuring that patient records are available to clinical staff when they need them. The assessment, however, highlighted that the trust needs to combine this with what is currently a separate policy on the retention and disposal of documents that are no longer required.

The trust will also be strengthening its systems for monitoring the distribution of patient safety alerts to ensure that any necessary follow-up action, such as amendments to policies or additional staff training, is carried out in a timely fashion.