Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust

When aggregating ratings, our inspection teams follow a set of principles to ensure consistent decisions. The principles will normally apply but will be balanced by inspection teams using their discretion and professional judgement in the light of all of the available evidence.

During the whole of this inspection, we found that patients, their relatives, staff and senior managers where all willing to engage in an open and frank way.

We rated this provider requires improvement and although we found areas of good practice across most care areas there are some patient safety issues that need to be addressed. At times, the trust did not provide effective care that met the standards of recognised good practice and some teams were not always responsive to the needs of patients and their carers.

Across the mental health services some good standards of patient safety were achieved however, we found unmanaged ligature risks on Harvington ward and in the rehabilitation units. While the service had carried out a ligature risk assessment, they had in some cases, taken no action to address the identified risks. On Keith Winter and Cromwell House there was some confusion about the expectation to address this and the inspection team found an inconsistency of approach to managing ligature risk in this area.