By Andrew Pring | 2 September 2014
The health sector regulator Monitor has today announced it is placing the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust into special measures because of serious failures in patient safety and leadership.
A recent inspection by the Care Quality Commission found a number of problems at East Kent including in A&E department, surgery, and services for young people. Patient safety was affected by low staffing levels and cultural issues, while staff surveys cited cases of bullying.
As a result, an improvement director will be appointed to provide support to the trust and hold it to account for making progress. The trust will also have to publish monthly updates of the changes it is making to improve the services it offers to patients.
Monitor’s regional director Paul Streat said: ‘The trust needs to urgently improve the safety of care for patients, and strengthen its management to better support frontline staff.
‘By putting the trust into special measures we can ensure they turn things around quickly,’ he added.
Responding to the announcement, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust chief executive Stuart Bain said that much of what is in the report had already been recognised by the trust.
‘Following a staffing review, we have invested an additional £2.9m to recruit 69 nurses where shortages exist [and] 55 of these have been recruited already. We have also recently appointed an additional four general surgeons and will be recruiting a further three surgeons very shortly.
‘We identified the need to improve our appointment system some time ago and have just completed a public consultation on our outpatient services that will allow us to make improvements to the services we offer patients.’
