The Care Quality Commission has today published a report following its short-notice inspection of the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s diagnostic imaging, medical and surgical care services at both acute hospitals at the end of 2022. This was in response to the Trust reporting 16 never events between March 2021 and November 2022.

Diagnostic imaging services have been rated as good, while the ratings for the inspection in medicine and surgery show a decrease in some areas and the services have been rated as requires improvement.

Chris Tidman, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, said: “We are pleased that our diagnostic imaging services have been rated good. We are of course disappointed by the results in our medical and surgical services, however we feel it is a fair reflection of the challenges the Trust and our teams were under at the time of the inspection.

“We are a learning organisation and we welcome feedback from the CQC and their response to our never events, which will help us to continuously improve our services for our patients and communities. We are reassured that the majority of the areas for improvement were already known to us, and work is underway to raise standards and performance.”

The report describes the challenges caused by the rollout of the Trust’s electronic patient record.

Chris said: “Epic brings us huge opportunities to modernise the care we provide to our patients, but with a new system of this size we always expected it to take time to become embedded, so we were not surprised to see this reflected in the report.”

There are some really positive reflections in the report too. Inspectors saw patients being treated with compassion and kindness, examples of positive-team working, staff feeling empowered to raise concerns and treating patients according to their individual needs.

Chris added: “As a leadership team, we are extremely proud of our staff and we encourage them to be proud too, of everything they do every day for our patients.”

This inspection was one of a number of CQC visits which will form the Royal Devon’s overall Trust rating. The Trust had a separate well-led inspection earlier in May which looked at the leadership and governance of the organisation. A further report and an overall Trust rating is expected in the coming weeks.