NHS trust must improve mental health staff gaps

An NHS hospital trust that runs mental health services across Lancashire has failed to improve after struggling with staff shortages, inspectors have found.

Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust was rated "good" overall by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), but the regulator found safety and effectiveness of care needed to change.

Inspectors found there were high levels of vacancies in the understaffed psychiatric intensive care units and acute wards for adults of working age, which put patient safety at risk.

A spokesman for the trust said efforts were under way to address the shortfall in workers, which was "a concern across the NHS".

Inspectors visited 21 of the trust's adult mental health wards across eight locations including Chorley, which was specifically named.

Their visit was prompted after concerns were received about serious incidents within the service, a CQC spokesman said.

Each service was judged to have "an increased risk that people could be harmed" as wards were often understaffed, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

But inspectors found the trust had made improvements to monitoring patients' physical health and conducting risk assessments.

They also found that not all patients had access to a psychologist.

However, the services were found to have made sufficient improvements to no longer be in breach of the regulations it had fallen foul of at the previous inspection in January 2024.

But the trust was told it must ensure it has sufficient numbers of staff and was ordered to produce an "action plan" in response to all the concerns raised.

A trust spokesman said the "safe and effective care of our patients is of utmost importance to us and we acknowledge how staffing levels, as raised in the CQC's report, does have an impact".

He said changes were under way, including the recruitment of more than 90 registered nurses throughout the past year within inpatient wards.

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