Ipswich Hospital

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) carried out a comprehensive inspection between the 6 and 8 January 2015. We also carried out unannounced inspections on 12 and 15 January 2015. We carried out this comprehensive inspection at Ipswich Hospital as part of our comprehensive inspection programme. Ipswich Hospital is part of Ipswich NHS Trust which was rated as being in band six of our intelligence monitoring tool and was therefore a low risk.

The hospital was first built around 1910, and has been expanded to cover 45 acres. The newest addition is the private finance initiative (PFI) wing, opened in 2007. The hospital serves around 385,000 people from Ipswich and East Suffolk. It has a relatively high deprivation score, being 83rd out of 326 (1 being the worst), and deals with significantly higher levels of depression and people living with dementia than average. There is also a higher than average number of young people with drug and alcohol-related health problems. However, the population that the trust sees has a higher than average life expectancy. We found that the trust had a relatively new executive team, who worked effectively together to highlight issues and address challenges within the hospital. We found the trust management team to be responsive and to act quickly to address issues highlighted to them during our inspection. The trust were aware of the issues of poor leadership faced on Sproughton Ward and highlighted this prior to our site visit. We also identified challenges on this ward, including poor documentation and a differing patient group than had originally been planned for this ward, and the trust took action overnight to ensure that people received safe and effective care in this ward. We returned to this ward during our announced and unannounced inspections, and found that improvements made had been sustained.

The comprehensive inspections result in a trust being assigned a rating of ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. Each section of the service receives an individual rating, which, in turn, informs an overall trust rating. The inspection found that overall, the trust has a rating of ‘Good.