Gloucestershire Royal Hospital

Gloucestershire Royal Hospital is one of two district general hospitals run by Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It is an acute hospital with 683 beds. It provides urgent and emergency services, medical care, surgical care, critical care, maternity and gynaecology, services for children and young people, end of life care and outpatient and diagnostic imaging services. It provides specialist cancer care to patients from Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire as the hub for the three Counties’ Cancer Network

We inspected this trust as part of our in-depth hospital inspection programme. The trust was selected as it was an example of a low risk trust according to our new Intelligent Monitoring model. The inspection took place with an announced inspection 10–13 and an unannounced 20 March 2015.

Overall, Gloucestershire Royal Hospital was rated as requiring improvement. We rated it as good for caring and as requiring improvements in safety, effectiveness, being responsive to patients’ needs and being well-led. Overall, critical care was rated as outstanding. Maternity and gynaecology and services for children and young people were rated as good with the remaining core services rated as requiring improvement.

The trust’s services are managed through a divisional structure that covers all the hospitals within the trust, with some staff rotating between the three sites of Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, Cheltenham General Hospital and Stroud Maternity Hospital; therefore there are significant similarities between the content of the three location reports.