Updated 23 August 2023
The University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) provides hospital services across the Morecambe Bay area - an area covering a thousand square miles in south Cumbria and north Lancashire.
It operates from three main hospitals - Furness General Hospital (FGH) in Barrow, the Royal Lancaster Infirmary (RLI), and Westmorland General Hospital (WGH) in Kendal.
FGH and the RLI have a range of general hospital services, with full emergency departments, critical/coronary care units and various consultant-led services. WGH provides a range of general hospital services, together with an urgent treatment centre.
All three hospitals provide a range of planned care including outpatients, diagnostics, therapies, day case and inpatient surgery. In addition, a range of local outreach services and diagnostics are provided from community facilities across Morecambe Bay.
We carried out an unannounced inspection of the medical care core service at Royal Lancaster Infirmary and the maternity core services at Royal Lancaster Infirmary and Furness General Hospital.
Following our previous inspection, under Section 31 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008, we imposed urgent conditions on the registration of the provider in respect to the regulated activities of diagnostics and screening and treatment of disorder, disease and injury for both medical and maternity services.
The trust made an application for the conditions to be removed in March 2023. The trust was inspected to assess whether the required improvements, had been made and sustained.
As a result of the evidence submitted by the trust and gathered during our inspections of the core services, we agreed to remove the conditions in June 2023.