Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

On this page

• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

Caring - this means we looked for evidence that the service involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect. At our last assessment we rated this key question good. At this assessment the rating has remained good. This meant people were supported and treated with dignity and respect; and involved as partners in their care.

This service scored 70 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

23 patients that we spoke with reported that staff always treated them with kindness, compassion and dignity. Staff took the time to get know each patients likes and dislikes. We observed positive interactions with staff and patients. Staff responded to distressed patients with kindness and took the time to support them. When patients made requests to staff, staff responded without delay or gave a reason for a delay and when they would be able to offer the support or complete the patients request. During the ICB quality visits they observed staff interacting with patients positively and therapeutic activity taking place.

Patients spoke to staff about their likes and dislikes, family and friends. They felt that staff took the time to get to know them. It was evident throughout the inspection that staff knew patients well. They not only provided care that was in line with individuals care plans, but they interacted with patients about everyday topics or hobbies. Whether this be discussing patients, jewellery preferences, their new slippers or books they were reading.

Patients had free access to their bedrooms, family or friends could visit and staff would book rooms for them to take place in private. Patients had care plans in place that they had agreed to, to limit access to certain rooms or property if their individual risks were high. They worked with staff to keep themselves safe and as soon as the risk had reduced, they had their full room access back or their property returned. Patients liked that staff worked with them in this way to keep them safe. Staff supported patients with their independence, allowing time for them to make decisions about their care, vocational and occupational needs. This included, personal care, kitchen assessments, laundry and accessing the community for activities. An independent advocacy service visited the wards regularly to speak with patients. Staff would refer patients to the advocacy service to get support. Posters were displayed on the wards to provide information on the advocacy service. Weekly community meetings took place on all wards where patients could discuss issues. Notes were taken and recorded what actions had been taken. We reviewed 6 copies of community meeting minutes and noted that patients raised issues or ideas for the ward and staff had taken action to address them.

Since the last assessment the feedback we received from patients about staff responding to their needs had improved greatly. Everyone we spoke with told us that staff met their needs, no matter what they were. Staff listened to them and acted on the issue without delay. Levels of staff was no longer impacting on the day to day running of the wards. There were a few examples were staff had to leave work early or not arrived for a shift due to ill health but this had minimal impact on the wards. At these times other members of the multidisciplinary team would support the ward. Throughout the assessment we saw that staff responded to people’s needs in a timely way. For example, getting patients off the ward to session so that they weren’t late.

We did not look at Workforce wellbeing and enablement during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.