Damning report sees hospital shut children’s wards
AMENTAL health hospital has been slapped with an official notice to improve after a surprise inspection exposed a series of failures.
The Priory Hospital Bristol was subjected to an unannounced visit from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), after the health and care regulator was told of concerns.
The regulator has nowpublished its report into the private hospital in Stapleton, following the unannounced visit in August.
It confirms the hospital has permanently closed down its two wards for children and adolescents – Banksy ward closed in July and Brunel ward in September – after discussions with NHS England.
The CQC’s report highlighted major issues with staffing on both wards, with high vacancy rates and an over-reliance on agency staff.
The regulator said the inspection was the result of “information giving us concerns about the safety and quality of the services”.
It only inspected the areas of the hospital it had received concerns about, which means the hospital has not been issued with a new rating because inspectors only sought to investigate specific areas.
This means it is still rated ‘good’ based on a CQC inspection in January 2019, when it was rated good in all areas except ‘requires improvement’ for one specific service – the working age and psychiatric intensive care unit.
Several improvements were noted for the latter unit, with staff reporting the working environment was “happy, but demanding and busy”.
However, the CQC issued the Priory with a regulatory notice to improve certain aspects of care, including the use of certain medicines, the use of agency staff and the process of incident reporting.
The new CQC report revealed staff had to temporarily ban batteries on the Banksy and Brunel wards after a spate of incidents of children swallowing them.
It stated: “This had led to staff using the providers search policy to search the ward for batteries and the introduction of a temporary restriction on the presence of batteries on the ward.
“Despite this information being shared with staff through handover, and three searches of the environment, a young person was able to self harm by swallowing batteries.
“Measures had not been sufficient in reducing the risks of reoccurrence of these incidents.”
The administering of tranquilising medicine to “challenging” patients was also raised as a concern.
Inspectors wrote: “Staff had not documented their decision making when they did not follow national guidance in what medicines they used to rapidly tranquilise patients.
“We found that there had been incidents recorded of young people being administered medicines against their wishes, outside of a legal framework.
“This had occurred four times and none of the occasions had not been reported as an incident.”
Staff were said to have neglected to raise some incidents or allegations of abuse appropriately and had failed to inform the council of safeguarding concerns. The report revealed one child had repeatedly tried to self-harm, but this was not recorded as an incident.
Inspectors noted there had been “significant upheaval” in the hospital leadership team since the last inspection. They also said: “Staff raised concerns with the culture of the wards for children and young people. Staff told us that the planned closure of the wards had affected morale of the staffing team. Staff on Brunel told us they felt undervalued.”
CQC head of hospital inspections Karen Bennett-Wilson, said the report made for “disappointing reading”.
She added: “We are continuing to work with other stakeholders and are monitoring the Priory Hospital Bristol closely.
“We will not hesitate to take further action if it fails to make the necessary improvements.”
The Priory, which runs more than 500 mental health facilities, said it took urgent action to address the shortcomings.
A spokesperson said: “We are absolutely committed to improvement, and have taken immediate action in the areas identified by the CQC. We decided to close our two CAMHS (children and adolescent mental health services) wards in July and September as the acute challenges in recruiting qualified, specialist staff meant we were unable to provide the high quality of service we expect.
“At the time of the CQC’s partial inspection in August, the hospital had a full senior management team in place. Since then, a new hospital director has been appointed who is closely overseeing the required improvements. We continue to work with all our stakeholders, including the CQC, to ensure our patients receive the best quality of care.”