The past couple of months have been important ones for St George’s, as it progressed its Foundation Hospital status and awaited the latest Care Quality Commission review of its clinical standards.
I’m supportive of St George’s being granted Foundation status, as it will give additional freedoms to the hospital and make it more independent of politicians (always a good move in my view!). However, there is always the concern that the organisational upheaval that such a move entails might cause distraction from clinical priorities in the short-term, so I was very interested to see what the Care Quality Commission (CQC) might find.
Therefore in February I attended the CQC Open Meeting for the local community, held in Earlsfield Library. Along with a hundred or so other local residents, I listened to the CQC explain how it would perform its review of St George’s Hospital later that month and when it would report back. Following that, we were put into half a dozen smaller groups to share stories of our experience of using St George’s.
What struck me was the strong consensus among the group. Almost everyone, including myself, had a very positive overall view of the hospital and its staff, regardless of whether they had used A&E, maternity, or other services. At the same time, most people had experienced poor communication at some stage, either within the hospital or between the hospital and a GP surgery. There were also concerns about the consistency of care offered, particularly to elderly patients.
Roll forward two months and the CQC has completed the review and recently published its findings. I’m very pleased to say that the report is positive, giving St George’s a clean bill of health in the form of an overall ‘good’ rating. Improvements are still needed in some areas such as providing end-of-life care, but there is no doubt that the general picture is of a well-run hospital with dedicated staff providing a good quality service to patients. This is particularly welcome as it represents a significant improvement from the CQC review a year earlier, which identified many more problem areas, so I’d like to congratulate the staff on such excellent progress.
Going forward, the hospital has an ambitious agenda to upgrade the site and the range of services offered to the community. The CQC report provides reassurance that the hospital is in good health and will be able to deliver on its future plans, to the benefit of all of us.