Doncaster based NHS trust told to improve safety

After a 10 day inspection, Care Quality Commission inspectors who visited Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust gave the Trust the overall rating of ‘requires improvement.’

Concerns included issues over safety insome services.

Community mental health services for people with learning disabilities or autism at the Ironstone Centre did not have enough staff to meet the needs of people who used the service. Inspectors also identified shortages of community nursing staff in some locations.

Staff in the substance misuse service were found to do only basic risk assessments and completed them inconsistently and did not review them regularly.

Inspectors said 14 records reviewed, staff had done only a basic risk assessment and substance misuse was not identified as a risk factor.

There were ligature points - places where someone intent on self-harm - could tie something to strangle themselves - there.

Inspectors did not see evidence that service users were individually risk assessed to include the possible risk of them using a ligature.

They also said in some areas the trust could run services more effectively, such as monitoring the physical health needs of some mental health services patients.

RDaSH provides mental health, learning disability, drug and alcohol services and community health services from over 200 locations.

Dr Deb Wildgoose, Executive Director of Nursing and Quality for RDaSH, said: “We welcome the report from the Care Quality Commission and the inspectors’ perspective on our services. This will help us to improve our services to patients.

“We were working on improving some of the areas highlighted to us by inspectors and we immediately took action to plan improvements to other areas of our service where we were judged that we could do better.

“83.5 per cent of all of the standards that were assessed were rated as good or outstanding and when the inspectors return to our Trust they will see that we have already improved, or are well on the way to improving, the areas flagged up to us.

“The vast majority of our services are rated as good or outstanding and we have already taken immediate action to improve those services we were told required improvement.”