Staff at a hospital in Hove have been celebrating an rating of “outstanding” from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the government’s official health watchdog.
The Montefiore Hospital, in Montefiore Road, Hove, said that it was one of fewer than a dozen private hospitals in the country to have achieved the CQC’s top rating.
The report follows a three-day inspection earlier this year after which hospital inspectors returned unannounced for a further day of checks.
The verdict comes as the Montefiore, run by healthcare firm Spire, prepares to mark its fifth birthday on the site that previously housed life assurance and pension business Legal and General.
The CQC said that the Montefiore was “good” for safe, caring and well-led services and “outstanding” at providing effective and responsive care.
The watchdog’s overall verdict was also “outstanding”.
The hospital’s recently appointed managing director David Eglington said: “I don’t think a single member of the team has been able to stop smiling since we heard this fantastic news.
“This an amazing achievement and reflects a huge amount of work by so many.
“This rating is not due to one or two individuals. It is a result of high-performing, passionate and caring teams throughout our hospital and reflects our motto of ‘brilliant basics, memorable moments’.
“I am particularly proud that the inspectors highlighted our strong relationship with our patients – welcoming patient feedback and acting upon this to continually improve our services is the Montefiore’s huge strength.”
The report said: “There was long-standing, consistent evidence that staff actively sought out patient and visitor feedback and made substantive improvements to the service as a result.”
The hospital has a patient experience committee and patient forums led by former patients and their relatives.
Changes resulting from patient feedback include the introduction of a lead nurse for pre-assessment, better discharge procedures and an initiative from the hospital’s head chef to introduce an on-demand hot meal ordering service so patients could order food at short notice.
The inspectors also praised staff for being “consistently and demonstrably passionate about and motivated” by the hospital’s vision and strategy for providing quality patient services.
There was “extensive evidence”, the report said, of effective, embedded multidisciplinary working and auditing. This included a physiotherapy team that actively sought opportunities for multi-professional learning and training and demonstrated how this improved patient experience and outcomes.
To read the full report, click here.
They must have done a HUGE amount of work ahead of the ANNOUNCED inspection is all I can imagine.
My experience of that place in Sept 2016 was Kafkaesquely surreal and they were the opposite of responsible, caring or effective. Chilling.
My experience is very different. I’ve been receiving outpatient care there over the past year for a shoulder injury (on the NHS, because it’s now cheaper for the NHS trust to pay for muscular-skeletal patients to go private than it is to pay the fines for missing waiting time targets) and it was like another world! I felt like a guest in a top hotel.