Kettering children’s ward which inspectors said was failing has made some improvements, says health boss

A children’s ward which inspectors said was failing has made some improvements, a health boss said.

The care regulator told Kettering General Hospital that its children and young people’s services were inadequate in April following an inspection last December.

Problems found last year included low staff morale, sepsis treatment, cleanliness and staff numbers.

But the hospital trust’s chief executive Deborah Needham said the Care Quality Commission (CQC) had reported some progress on its neonatal unit, its Skylark children’s ward and emergency department after another unannounced visit on 26 April.

Mrs Needham said they had noted improved staff morale and that parents ‘felt listened to.’

But she also said there were some issues found, including documentation that was sometimes ‘just not clear enough’.

The trust expects the final written report either later this week or next week ahead of it being published publicly in July.

The CQC saw in December that not all staff members’ mandatory training had been completed.

The trust’s board was told all training has now been completed.

“What they did say was that our colleagues were happier. Our colleagues in our children’s areas were happy to be at work and that was not something that they saw in December.

“They also said that families that they spoke to – and they spoke to a lot of families on that day – felt listened to by the staff and again that was really good to hear because we knew that hasn’t always been the case,” Mrs Needham said.

“They did find that some documentation was not always clear but what they did say when they looked at the documentation…the right treatment had been given but we were just not clear enough in our documentation at times.”

She added: “Nobody comes to work to do a bad job. Staff have accepted what the CQC found, we all have, and they have really risen to the challenge of making changes, which is fantastic.”

Mrs Needham said she is ‘absolutely willing to meet anybody’ to speak about their experience at the hospital and that she is ‘here to listen’.

Andrea Hargreaves, the trust’s head of nursing and young people’s services, said improved monitoring will need to be maintained.

“Part of our improvement plan is going to be around keeping on with our monitoring process so that when we see something has dipped, we then go to do a deeper dive into that and put some corrective measures in and then monitor that.

"It’s about not taking our eye off the ball with the monitoring for me,” she said.

The trust’s overall CQC rating remains requires improvement.