Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) carried out a comprehensive inspection between the 6 and 8 January 2015. We also carried out an unannounced inspection on 12 and 15 January 2015. We carried out this comprehensive inspection at Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust as part of our comprehensive inspection programme. The trust was placed in band 6 following our intelligence monitoring tool surveillance, this is the lowest risk band.

The trust has one hospital which 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. It serves around 385,000 people from Ipswich and East Suffolk. 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 acted quickly to address issues highlighted to them during our inspection. The trust were aware of the issues faced on Sproughton Ward and highlighted this prior to our site visit. We also identified challenges on 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.