Russells Hall Hospital workers reveal fears over patient safety
Patients with life-threatening symptoms at Russells Hall Hospital are not being ‘escalated’ when they should be, inspectors say.
Stressed out staff told officials from a health watchdog they even feared for the safety of patients and said they felt the environment was unsafe.
A new Care Quality Commission report on the hospital also said one patient who died there was not classed as an emergency despite showing signs of serious illness.
It said: “During a review of retrospective records for the month prior to the inspection, we saw an example where a patient had showed serious signs of illness and later passed away but due to their total National Early Warning Score being within‘normal’ parameters they were not escalated and treated promptly.”
Other concerns raised in the report from a visit in March were:
Medical and nursing cover was not sufficient to meet the needs of patients with the hospital relying heavily on agency staff.
Records were not always written and managed in a way that kept patients safe.
Two patients whose condition had deteriorated went unnoticed by staff.
Patients without allergy wristbands.
Chief Executive of the Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, Diane Wake, said: “We recognise the challenges that we have in our Emergency Department. There are four key areas for improvement these are, care of the deteriorating patient, use of agency and bank staff and skills mix and use of allergy wristbands. We are supporting staff to make the improvements we need to. We have done this through further sepsis training, the introduction of our electronic sepsis management system and support from the sepsis team.”
It was revealed in April how Urgent and emergency care has been rated inadequate.
This was a follow-up visit with no new rating given.
