Updated 23 May 2024
Kettering General Hospital is provided by Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and is a district general hospital in Northamptonshire. Kettering General Hospital serves north Northamptonshire and south Leicestershire and Rutland. It became a foundation trust in 2008 and is led by a board of directors comprising of a non-executive chairman, chief executive, executive directors, and non-executive Directors. The board is accountable to the council of governors that is made up of elected and nominated representatives of the population of north Northamptonshire.
As of July 2021, the trust formed a group collaboration model with a local NHS trust and later extended this to a third NHS trust in October 2023. The aim is to improve access to services with a single vision and shared values and priorities. The 3 hospital trusts remain as separate organisations with their own boards and leadership teams.
Kettering General Hospital is an acute hospital with a 24-hour accident and emergency department. This includes a paediatric emergency department. It has approximately 600 beds which includes medical and surgical beds, maternity, women’s and children and critical care beds. The trust has an outpatient's department and a range of diagnostics provided both at Kettering General Hospital and at satellite locations in Kettering, Irthlingborough, Corby, Isebrook and Wellingborough. They also provide surgical day case and ambulatory care. In addition to the full range of district general hospital care, the trust provides some specialist services including cardiac care for the county.
We carried out this unannounced comprehensive inspection of Kettering General Hospital because we received information giving us concerns about the safety and quality of the services and because at our last rated inspection, in December 2022, we rated parts of the service within urgent and emergency care and children and young persons service as inadequate.
We carried out this inspection over 2 consecutive days in December 2023. We inspected 4 core services including:
- Urgent and emergency care.
- Medical care.
- Surgery.
- Children and young people’s service.
On this inspection we did not cover the well-led key question for the trust overall.
We visited various areas relevant to each of the core services. Our inspection teams consisted of inspectors, pharmacist specialists, specialist advisors for each area including mental health, an operations manager and deputy director.
We spoke with 167 staff members of various roles across different specialities. This included nurses, doctors of all grades, health care support workers, therapy staff, pharmacists, play therapists, operating department practitioners, domestic staff, administrative staff as well as service leaders and managers.
We spoke with 48 patients and 22 relatives, carers and parents. We also reviewed 115 patient records.
Our overall rating of the provider did not change and remains as requires improvement. However, the overall well-led key line of enquiry changed from good to requires improvement, while we found improvement in children and young persons services. In December 2022 the children and young persons service was rated as inadequate overall. While we did carry out a further responsive and focussed inspection of the children and young persons service in April 2023 and took enforcement action, we did not re-rate the service at that time. This meant that the rating from the December 2022 inpsection was carried forward. Children and young persons service is now rated as requires improvement.
You can find further information about how we carry out our inspections on our website: www.cqc.org.uk/what-we-do/how-we-do-our-job/what-we-do-inspection.