West London NHS Trust

The Trust operates from eight registered locations including five hospitals, Lakeside Mental Health Unit in Hounslow, St Bernard’s in Ealing, Hammersmith and Fulham Mental Health Unit, The Cassel in Ham, Clayponds Hospital and Broadmoor in Bracknell Forest. The trust provides community mental health and community health services from a number of team bases in the London boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing and Hounslow. 

The Trust has been inspected eight times since 2015. We conducted a comprehensive inspection of the trust in 2015, 2017 and 2018. This inspection visit took place from 14 January – 27 February, 2020.

We inspected four services as part of our ongoing checks on the safety and quality of healthcare services: 

• Acute wards for adults of working age and psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) 

• Specialist community mental health services for children and young people (CAMHS) 

• Perinatal services 

• Child and adolescent mental health ward 

We returned to the acute wards and PICU because we saw significant improvements during a focused inspection in 2018 and we wanted to see if they had been sustained. We did not re-rate the service in 2018 as we only looked at specific issues. 

We inspected community CAMHS as they were rated requires improvement at our last inspection of the service in 2017. 

Perinatal mental health services had never been inspected before, so we included them to better understand the strengths and risks associated with this service. 

We included a focused inspection of the child and adolescent mental health ward as we had been notified of some incidents on the ward and because it was overdue for refurbishment. 

Three Mental Health Act monitoring visits to Avonmore Ward, Finch Ward and The Wells Unit took place concurrently with our inspection. They have been reported on separately.