Care Quality Commission report tells mixed bag of results for Stoke Mandeville Hospital

The report identified several areas that need improvement, including: the management of medicines, environmental improvements, consistency in record keeping, governance processes, learning from incidents, and training.

Several areas however have been praised, including: learning from excellent examples of care, safeguarding of staff and patients, teamwork and local partnerships and co-ordination with other hospitals.

Chief Executive Neil Dardis said: “We welcome this latest report from the CQC. We are pleased that they acknowledge that some tough challenges have been tackled and improvements made since their last inspection.

“It is clear though that there is still more work to do and the report rightly highlighted those areas where we are not getting it right all the time for our patients and staff. We have an ambition to become one of the safest healthcare systems in the country and the recommendations made in these reports will help us with our ongoing quality improvement programme.”

“Importantly however I am proud that the inspection team has once again recognised the caring and compassionate attitude of staff. I want to thank all staff whose hard work and dedication have made a real difference to the care and experience we provide to our communities.”

The report said: "We carried out a focused unannounced inspection visit on 6 September 2016. We inspected the medical, surgical and end of life care services provided at this location. During the inspection, we also followed up issues identified at the inspection in February 2014 and March 2015 relevant to the service types inspected. Overall, medical care, surgery and end of life care were rated as ‘requires improvement’. All the services required improvement to provide safe care. Medical care and end of life care services required improvement to provide effective care and surgery required improvement to provide responsive care. We rated all of them ‘good’ for caring and ‘well led’ services.