Our CQC ratings

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. It monitors, inspects and regulates services.

The CQC has rated our Trust as 'requires improvement'.

You can view its reports below, as well as the CQC's individual rating of each of our hospitals.

The latest CQC inspections of our Trust took place in May and July 2023. The CQC inspected our urgent and emergency care, medical care (including older people’s services) and children and young people services at William Harvey Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital. Inspectors also looked at the management and leadership of the trust overall.

We welcome the CQC’s report, which highlights a number of issues that we have been working hard to address. There is and will continue to be, a strong focus on the work required to put the Trust on a more sustainable footing.

We are building a substantive leadership team and are embedding an organisational structure designed to ensure staff and services have the stability and the right level of support to meet the needs of our local population going forward.

Since these inspections, we have improved how we work across the hospitals to support our emergency departments and the safety and experience of our patients. The building programmes at our emergency departments, which have extended and reconfigured both departments to provide better facilities, have also progressed and are near completion. 

While improvements have been made, there is more for us to do and we must ensure that positive changes are truly sustained. At the same time, it is important that we recognise the excellent examples of care in our Trust, some of which have been described as outstanding practice by the CQC.

We are fully committed to delivering improvements for patients and demonstrating further progress to the CQC next time they visit.