- SERVICE PROVIDER
Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust
This is an organisation that runs the health and social care services we inspect
Report from 17 January 2025 assessment
Contents
Ratings - Acute wards for adults of working age and psychiatric intensive care units
Our view of the service
Littlebrook Hospital has three acute wards for adults of working age: Amberwood ward, Pinewood and Cherrywood ward. Amberwood ward is a male only ward and had 17 beds; Cherrywood ward is a female only ward and had 16 beds and Pinewood ward is a male only ward with 10 beds . There was one psychiatric intensive care unit, with 12 beds, called the Willowsuite that admitted men only. This assessment focused on Cherrywood and Amberwood wards. These wards were provided by Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust as part of the trust’s acute directorate. We assessed five quality statements from the safe and well-led key questions and found areas of good practice. The assessment group of Acute wards for adults of working age and psychiatric intensive care units was assessed in a focussed inspection in 2023 looking at the safe and well led questions across all the acute wards in the Trust. During the 2023 inspection the 2 wards we looked at were included and the whole core service was found to be requires improvement overall. We conducted this focussed assessment following a number of concerns relating to the management of patients leave from the wards at the hospital. During this assessment we saw that there were systems and processes that had been implemented by the trust to support the staff to manage these concerns and that these were in the process of being embedded into the day to day running of the wards. Staff had access to safety bulletins sent out by the acute directorate governance team and these were being discussed and disseminated in staff team meetings and via the clinical governance structure.
People's experience of this service
Patients were positive about the wards at Littlebrook Hospital. They told us that they were confident in the staff team and the ward managers and the team’s ability to keep them safe. They told us they were receiving the care and treatment they need. Patients were not always aware of their care and treatment plans and didn’t always know who to go to when they wanted to discuss their care or to raise a complaint. Patients told us they had not received any written information when they had first come into the hospital and that this would have been helpful. The organisation was in the process of reviewing their patient information leaflets and had removed them while they were being updated. Patients told us that, they felt safe on the wards even when people are distressed, they had confidence in the staff to keep them safe. People told us they felt the staff were doing their best to help them to improve their mental health and support them to leave hospital.