East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust was one of the 14 trusts reviewed as part of the Keogh Review in 2013 based on the trust having been an outlier for the previous two consecutive years on either the Summary Hospital-Level Mortality Index (SHMI) or the Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR). The review identified a number of concerns at the trust particularly related to the quality governance assurance systems. The review panel also identified a number of areas of good practice and dedicated staf, but there was more for the trust to do to communicate efectively to staf and share learning to ensure consistent approaches to quality improvement across the organisation, all of the time.

The trust was placed in special measures and CQC inspected the trust using the new comprehensive inspection model in July 2014. This resulted in the hospital overall being rated as Requires Improvement with improvement needed in urgent care; medical care; surgery and end of life care.

This inspection was a follow up and was conducted on 20 and 21 September 2016 and was a well-led review to follow up the focused inspection conducted on 19, 20 and 21 October 2015. We did not inspect the community sites and only reviewed four core services in October 2015 in order to review the progress of the trust since coming out of special measures in July 2014. We have aggregated the ratings following this inspection with the previous ratings for the services not inspected to give a revised rating for the trust. We also looked at the governance and risk management support for the services we inspected.