Queen Alexandra Hospital

8th February 2017
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Grading Explained: Requires Improvement
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Queen Alexandra Hospital is the acute district general hospital of the Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust. It is the amalgamation of three previous district general hospitals, re-commissioned into a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in 2009. The hospital has approximately 1,053 inpatient beds, and has over 140,000 emergency attendances each year.

We undertook a unannounced focussed inspection at Queen Alexandra Hospital on 22 and 23 February and 3 and 4 March 2016. We inspected the Emergency Department (ED) and Medicine specifically the urgent medical pathway. At that time we found some patients in the emergency department (ED) were at risk of unsafe care and treatment and there were areas of poor practice where the trust needed to make improvements.

We considered that people who used the emergency services at Queen Alexandra Hospital would, or may be, exposed to the risk of harm if we did not impose urgent conditions for the Trust to provide a safe service to patients. On 15 March 2016, we took urgent action and issued a notice of decision to impose conditions on their registration as a service provider.

We asked the trust to take immediate action, under section 31 of the Health and Social Care Act (2008), and imposed four conditions on their registration. We told the trust to immediately ensure:

  • A clinical transformation lead is appointed based on external advice and agreement, and ensure effective medical and nursing leadership in the emergency department.

  • Patients attending the Emergency Department at Queen Alexandra Hospital are triaged, assessed and streamlined by appropriate staff, and escalation procedures are followed.

  • The “Jumbulance” is not used on site at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, under any circumstances. The exception to this will be if a major incident is declared.

  • CQC receive daily monitoring information that is to be provided on a weekly basis

On 29 and 30 September 2016 we undertook an unannounced and focussed inspection of the emergency care pathway at the Queen Alexandra Hospital. The focus of our unannounced inspection was on the actions the trust had taken as a result of the urgent conditions imposed on them to improve the identified risks to patients through their emergency care pathway. We inspected two core services urgent and emergency care and medical services.