Trust welcomes inspectors report

24 October 2002

The West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust today (24 October) welcomed the findings of the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) report into its activities.

"The report paints a good picture of the trust and I am very pleased with their overall conclusion that we are committed to developing systems to improve patient care," said chief executive John Parkes.

The CHI report highlights the quality of the trust s clinical work that has resulted in significantly lower death rates among patients admitted for emergency and non-emergency reasons. Patients are also less likely to be readmitted to the trust within four weeks of being discharged than patients of similar hospitals.

It praises the trust for developing guidelines for staff on best clinical practice and highlights areas of innovation such as the pink book, a clinical information resource for staff and GPs.

It also highlights the trust s relationship with volunteers and team working on cancer with other health care providers through a new teleconferencing system.

"I am very pleased that CHI recognised the hard work and commitment of members of staff at all levels along with examples of good practices the rest of the NHS can learn from," said Mr Parkes.

"As well as praising us CHI also comments on some of the problems we are facing such as staffing levels and internal communication. These are matters that we are already addressing but it is very useful to have comments from other healthcare professionals who have looked at us thoroughly for the first time."

The trust will now create an action plan to address the points raised by the inspectors and will be involving members of staff from every area of the trust as well as other health care partners and stakeholders to bring about improvements.

"There is always room for improvement and I see the CHI report as giving us the impetus to look afresh at what we do and how we do it. Addressing these and other issues is all part of our determination to drive up further the standards of patient care and regain our three star status," added Mr Parkes.