The Royal Victoria Hospital is a community hospital that provides a range of local services.  East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust provides outpatient and diagnostic services from this Hospital. As part of the trust inspection we visited the Royal Victoria Hospital site to inspect outpatient and diagnostic services.

Our key findings were as follows:

• The trust approach to planning and improving outpatients services had significantly improved the quality of service to patients and that the Royal Victoria Hospital was part of that success.
• As with other parts of the trust, the inability to meet referral to treatment times were hindering the responsiveness of services.
• Outpatients at Folkestone Hospital were providing safe care to patients. There were systems in place, supported by adequate resources to enable the department to provide good quality care to patients attending for appointments.
• An appropriate framework to maintain a competent workforce was in place and teams had a multidisciplinary basis.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• The Nurse leadership in outpatients was outstanding with staff inspired to provide a good service to patients. The main outpatient’s matron provided knowledgeable and inspirational support to staff whilst working hard to maintain and improve the service.

However, there were also areas of poor practice where the trust needs to make improvements.

Importantly, the trust must:

• The Trust must ensure that all taps in clinical rooms are working effectively.
• The Trust should ensure that clinical areas are not carpeted. Where clinical areas are carpeted they must be managed with effective risk assessment and cleaning regimes.

In addition the trust should:

• The trust should continue to improve Referral to Treatment times across all specialities to ensure that patients are treated in an acceptable timeframe following referral to the service.

Professor Sir Mike Richards

Chief Inspector of Hospitals