The Care Quality Commission has published a report following a focussed inspection of medicine at Southport and Formby District General Hospital in March.

Chief Executive Trish Armstrong-Child said: “I am really pleased inspectors found significant improvement since their last inspection across all the areas they reviewed. They also noted staff spoke positively about the culture in the hospital and the support and visibility of the leadership teams on the medical wards.

“These improvements are the result of hard work, compassion and commitment from our dedicated nurses, doctors, all other health professionals, and our non-clinical support teams. We are committed to providing the best care possible to all our patients and will continue to build on these improvements to make sure we consistently deliver safe, high quality care for local people.”

The Trust is pleased that inspectors recognised the leadership team had identified areas for improvement which were already being addressed. Some examples of ongoing improvements include:

• Since December 2020, teams across the Southport and Ormskirk health and social care system have been working together to support patients who are ready to leave hospital but not ready to return home. This partnership has allowed patients to receive the care they need and frees up hospital beds for very unwell patients admitted to our hospitals through A&E

• Establishing a wellbeing call service which is run by trained volunteers to help prevent readmissions to our hospitals. 391 calls were made in the first month since the service was launched at the end of March 2021. Patient feedback from these calls is confidentially shared with wards and our pharmacy staff to improve services Patients can be referred to other services for support as appropriate, for example social services and voluntary support services

• Colleagues from Queenscourt Hospice in Southport have been working with our staff to improve the care we provide and to support them to take a more individual approach to every patient and the care they receive. This builds on the team’s work with Oasis ward during the first wave of coronavirus pandemic, where we established a ward for patients needing specialist care

Services were inspected but not rated and our overall Trust rating will be reviewed at our next full inspection.