Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Updated 3 July 2019

Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital became an NHS Foundation Trust in December 2009. The trust is situated in the Broadgreen area of Liverpool and provides specialist heart and chest services for the North West of England, including North Wales and the Isle of Man. The trust serves a catchment area of 2.8 million people, spanning Merseyside, Cheshire, North Wales and the Isle of Man, and increasingly receive referrals from outside these areas. In 2018 the trust acquired the regional congenital heart disease service.

The trust has 183 inpatient beds across nine inpatient wards. In addition to this, they run 266 outpatient’s clinics per week including 115 physical healthcare clinics. From June 2017 to May 2018 the trust had 10,470 inpatient admissions, 75,107 outpatient attendances (20% increase) and 204 patient deaths (5% increase). The trust has 1,647 staff which includes 146 medical staff and 496 nursing staff. The trust’s operating revenue was £144.5 million.

At the time of our inspection the trust provided:

• Medical care;
• Surgery;
• Critical Care;
• Children and Young People service;
• End of life care;
• Community services; and
• Outpatients

We last inspected the trust in September 2016. We rated the trust overall as outstanding. The core services at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital were rated overall as good.

Updated 3 July 2019

Our rating of the trust stayed the same. We rated it as outstanding because:

We rated safe and effective as good. We rated caring, responsive and well-led as outstanding.

We rated surgery, one of the trust’s five services, as outstanding. In rating the trust, we took into account the current ratings of the four services not inspected this time.

We rated well-led for the trust overall as outstanding.

Our full Inspection report summarising what we found and the supporting Evidence appendix containing detailed evidence and data about the trust is available on our website – www.cqc.org.uk/provider/RBQ/reports.

Updated 16 September 2016

We rated community services at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital as outstanding in caring, responsive and well led key questions. We rated safe and effective key questions as good.

• Feedback from patients and those close to them was consistently positive about the way staff treated them. Staff went the extra mile to provide care and support. There was a strong person‑centred approach to providing care.

• Relationships between people who use services and staff were caring, respectful and promoted people’s dignity.

• Services provided by the trust reflected people’s individual needs and preferences and continuity of care for patients was central for staff. The hospital had implemented a number of schemes to help meet people’s individual needs

• Incidents were reported by staff through effective systems. Lessons were learnt and staff were able to recognise and respond to changes in risk to people who used community services.

• Staff followed good hygiene practices.

• Staffing levels were reviewedto ensure that there were enough staff with the correct skills to keep people safe.

• Best practice guidance in relation to care and treatment was followed and community services participated in national and local audits. Action plans were in place to continuously monitor service quality and delivery and maintain standards. All staff were engage with monitoring and evaluating their services. The service was meeting or exceeding the majority of their key performance targets and met or exceeded outcomes in line with national benchmarking and guidance such as

• Patients were supported to raise a concern or a complaint. Lessons were learnt and improvements made from complaint investigations. Community services captured views of people who used the services with changes made following feedback. The friends and family test showed that people would recommend the hospital to friends or a relative.

• All staff knew the trust and service vision and were committed to driving continuous improvement setting their own internal targets to seek out and trial new models of care in the community.