The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has again rated the forensic inpatient and secure wards run by Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust as good, following an inspection that finished in April last year.
Brockfield House has seven wards and provides care and treatment for male and female with a mental health disorder in a secure setting. During this inspection, CQC visited five wards including Alpine, Forest, Aurora, Fuji and Causeway Ward.
CQC carried out an unannounced inspection after receiving information of concern about people’s care and treatment on the forensic wards. CQC found these concerns to be unsubstantiated.
The service’s overall rating has again been rated as good, as well as for being effective, caring, responsive and well-led. The rating for safe has been upgraded to good from requires improvement.
The trust’s overall rating is unchanged and remains rated as requires improvement.
Inspectors found:
- Staff had the right skills, training and experience to deliver safe care, and there were enough staff available to meet people's needs and ensure ward safety.
- Staff minimised the use of restrictive practices, with a clear commitment to reduce the use of restraint and seclusion. Staff used therapeutic approaches and de-escalation wherever possible.
- People gave positive feedback about the facilities for being clean, safe and well maintained. Aurora ward had been recently refurbished and there were ongoing improvements across other areas of the service.
- Staff managed medicines extremely safely including via regular monitoring and understanding people who may be able to support themselves. With this understanding and monitoring some people were supported to self-administer their own medication following risk assessment.
- People had access to advocacy and were informed of their rights, with support available to raise concerns or complaints through various accessible channels.
- People's discharge planning was proactive and well managed, with regular reviews and collaboration with external services to support timely transitions.
- Staff worked across disciplines to ensure people's physical and mental health needs were assessed and monitored regularly.
The report will be published on the CQC website in the next few days.
Due to a large-scale transformation programme at CQC, this report has not published as soon after the inspection as it should have done. The programme involved changes to the technology CQC uses but resulted in problems with the systems and processes rather than the intended benefits. The amount of time taken to publish the reports falls far short of what people using services and the trust should be able to expect and CQC apologises for this.
While publication of some reports has been delayed, any immediate action that CQC needed to take to protect people using services was not affected and was carried out in a timely way. CQC is taking urgent steps to ensure that inspection reports are published in a timelier way.