Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

On this page

• Overview
• Assessing needs
• Delivering evidence-based care and treatment
• How staff, teams and services work together
• Supporting people to live healthier lives
• Monitoring and improving outcomes
• Consent to care and treatment

Most patients we spoke with felt their needs were being met. However, those who required specialist services often felt frustrated and felt the service could not meet their needs. Staff we spoke with showed compassion in ensuring a person-centred approach was taken when assessing patients' needs. Due to staffing numbers, staff were not always able to meet patient needs and patients often had to wait for longer than trust policy to receive assessments. Not all teams received effective communication form the crisis team around patients that had contacted them out of hours.

This service scored 71 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

Most people we spoke with felt their needs were being met. One patient told us “They go way beyond expectations”. However, one patient we spoke with felt that the team they were under were not helping them and they told us “I am about to walk away from them”. This was due to the frustration of the referral process to access specialist services. Another patient told us when they joined the service, their team already knew their history. The patient told us “Didn’t have a personal connection with previous services but felt a connection with this service from the start”.

Staff and leaders, we spoke with showed passion and compassion when discussing how they supported patients. Teams described their motivation around person centred care and explained how they put it into practice. They felt the systems in place always had the person in the centre of everything they did.

Each team had a duty worker to triage any urgent issues and triage referrals. Processes were in place to allocate a qualified member of staff to fulfil this duty. Triage appointments were allocated daily with each team. However, due to staffing numbers these were not always delivered. This meant patients who had been referred would wait longer than the trusts policy. We were told incident forms were completed when this occurred. Each team had daily meetings where they discussed patients who were presenting risks. They assessed and prioritised who they needed to respond to or who needed to have any assessments prioritised. Each service had processes in place for triaging patients that got referred to each team. There were clear and effective processes in place if patients didn’t attend appointments or where staff were struggling to contact them. These were called ‘Did not attend or DNA’. However, the process in referring patients to the crisis team was not clear. Four of the teams had a system in place where the crisis team would email daily to handover any calls received during out of hours. One team were not receiving these emails regularly and the process was not effective in safely assessing patients.

We did not look at Delivering evidence-based care and treatment during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.

We did not look at How staff, teams and services work together during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.

We did not look at Supporting people to live healthier lives during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.

We did not look at Monitoring and improving outcomes during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.

We did not look at Consent to care and treatment during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.