BLACK Country NHS Foundation Trust has been given a 'requires improvement' rating by England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals.

Care Quality Commission inspected the core services provided by the trust over five days in November visiting hospital wards and community based mental health services.

The trust provides services to people living in the boroughs of Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Walsall.

The CQC has rated the trust as 'requires improvement' overall, 'good' for being caring and responsive and 'requires improvement' for being safe, effective and well led.

CQC deputy chief inspector of hospitals Dr Paul Lelliott, said: “Our inspectors found the trust must make a number of improvements to bring its services up to a level that would earn a rating of 'good' overall.

"We gave immediate feedback to the trust following the inspection and this report presents the detail of our findings, our ratings and our recommendations."

He added: “In particular, we were concerned that the trust was not always ensuring that patients were safe by providing and maintaining emergency equipment or managing and storing medication properly. The trust also needed to introduce a robust system for managing patient records.

“Our inspection also highlighted that the trust needed to make sure sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified staff were available at all times to make sure the care provided met people’s needs."

He added: “Despite these concerns, we found a number of areas of good practice. This included how young people were involved in making decisions about their care and that the trust had also employed a nurse who spoke four Asian languages to lead on work with black and minority ethnic communities.

“The trust leadership knows what it needs to do to bring about improvement in the areas identified and our inspectors will return at a later date to check on what progress has been made.“ The CQC has told the trust to take action on several issues including: all areas, visited by patients for their clinical reviews, must have emergency equipment such as automated external defibrillators and oxygen on site.

And the trust must ensure management of potential risk from ligature risks do not compromise patient’s privacy and dignity.

Karen Dowman, chief executive of the trust, said: “Although we are disappointed with our overall rating, we were pleased that the CQC rated the majority of our services as ‘good’ and three as ‘outstanding’. 

"We missed  an overall rating of ‘good’ by only a few points."

She added: "To be rated as ‘good’ for being ‘caring’ and ‘responsive’ is a great achievement and demonstrates how committed our staff are to the needs of our patients and service users."

She added: "Since the inspection, we have completed the work in those areas that were rated as requiring improvement by the CQC inspectors, with the exception of issues that  require structural alterations which we are considering at the moment.


"I am extremely proud of the feedback I received from CQC inspectors on how caring they found our staff to be without exception.”

The full report is at www.cqc.org.uk/provider/TAJ.