Updated
22 April 2025
This was a service assessment of surgery services only. Please see the summaries below for surgery. The location rating of ‘insufficient evidence to rate’ is stated as we have not assessed all the core services for Good Hope Hospital, and we cannot therefore rate the location overall.
Good Hope Hospital is an acute general hospital in Sutton Coldfield. The hospital is part of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and serves north Birmingham, Sutton Coldfield and a large part of south east Staffordshire including Burntwood, Lichfield and Tamworth.
We completed an unannounced assessment of surgery services at this location between 20 and 21 June 2024. Based on information of concern, we looked at specific quality statements in safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. As this assessment was based on risk, we only completed quality statements which were connected to the areas of concern.
As a result of our assessment, we issued the trust with a Section 29a Warning Notice as significant improvements were required in relation to governance. The Section 29a Warning Notice has given the trust until 31 December 2024 to rectify the areas for significant improvement we identified.
Updated
16 April 2025
Good Hope Hospital provides a range of emergency and elective surgery for the local population, both as inpatients and day-case patients. Specialties provided by the hospital includes trauma and orthopaedics, general surgery and gynaecology. There are 5 surgical wards within the hospital, Wards 2, 7, 16, 17 and 29 and also a surgical assessment unit and day surgery unit.
During our onsite assessment, we spoke with 52 staff of all roles and responsibilities, 8 patients and 2 carers. We reviewed 14 patient records including consent forms and WHO checklists.
We found the service did not ensure patients were safe at all times and staff did not always learn from incidents. Patients were not always able to access the service due to the demand for hospital beds for other patients. The service did not always demonstrate effective governance processes.
However, the service had processes to ensure staff worked well together and patients received kind and compassionate care and had their medicines administered in line with policy and legislation.
Along with the warning notice issued for failures in governance, we have issued requests for action plans against a number of regulations. These are:
Regulation 12 (1) (2) (c): Safe care and treatment. The service did not ensure safe care and treatment was provided in a safe way as it was not ensuring the persons providing care or treatment had the qualifications, competence, skills and experience to do so safely. Some staff in wards reported they did not have training to use all items of equipment. Staff in recovery had only received basic life support training yet were caring for vulnerable patients.
Regulation 15 (1) (b): Premises and equipment. The service did not ensure all equipment was secure. Some resuscitation trolleys did not have tamper-evidence mechanisms and items were known to have gone missing. No action had been taken following audit to rectify the issue.
Regulation 18 (1) (a): Staffing. The service must have sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced staff. Staff must receive such appropriate support, training, professional development, supervision and appraisal as is necessary to enable them to carry out the duties they are employed to perform. There were insufficient staff in the service to safety provide care and treatment at all times. Not all staff had updated their safeguarding training. There was insufficient evidence to demonstrate what training had been completed in some subjects.
Medical care (including older people’s care)
Updated
14 February 2024
Updated
6 February 2020
We carried out an unannounced focused inspection of the diagnostic imaging service at Good Hope Hospital on 22 August 2019, in response to concerning information we had received in relation to a serious incident. We did not inspect any other core services, or any other locations provided by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.
We did not cover all key questions or lines of enquiry and we did not rate this service at this inspection. We inspected elements of safe, responsive and well led.
Urgent and emergency services
Updated
14 February 2024