Outstanding trust handed warning notice

An ‘outstanding’ rated acute trust has been served with a warning notice by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and told to make ‘significant and immediate improvements’ to its mental health and learning disabilities services.

The CQC said staff at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Foundation Trust had not always carried out mental capacity assessments when people presented with mental health needs. And this included when decisions were made to restrain patients in the emergency department.

A CQC warning notice, published alongside a report of an inspection between 30 November and 1 December last year, says the trust must make “significant and immediate improvements in the quality of care being provided” to people with mental health issues, learning disabilities or autism.

The warning notice also says the trust must ensure people with a learning disability and autistic people “receive care which meets the full range of their needs”. The trust’s records “did not show evidence that staff had considered patients’ additional needs,” the regulator said.

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Source: HSJ, 24 February 2023