A summary of our findings about this location appears in the overall summary.

Bridlington Hospital was one of three main hospitals forming York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The trust provided some hospital services to the local population. The trust also provided a range of other acute services from York and Scarborough hospitals to people in the wider York area, the north-eastern part of North Yorkshire and parts of the East Riding of Yorkshire. In total, the trust had approximately 1170 beds, over 8700 staff and a turnover of approximately £442,612m in 2013/14. Bridlington Hospital had 88 beds.

Bridlington Hospital provided medical, surgical, outpatients and diagnostics and end of life care for people across the Bridlington and Driffield area of East Yorkshire.

We inspected Bridlington Hospital as part of the comprehensive inspection of York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which includes this hospital, York and Scarborough hospitals and community services. We inspected Bridlington Hospital on 17 and 19 March 2015.

Overall, we rated Bridlington Hospital as ‘requires improvement’ overall. We rated it ‘good’ for being caring, effective and responsive but it requires improvement in providing safe care and for being well led.

We rated surgical services, and end of life care as ‘good. However, medical care and outpatient and diagnostic services ‘require improvement’.

Our key findings were as follows:

• The trust was half way through its five year plan in integrate services following the acquisition of Scarborough & North East Yorkshire NHS Trust in 2012.There was some concern by staff at Bridlington hospital about how the integration was progressing and they did not feel engaged with the process.
• Care and treatment was delivered with compassion and patients reported that they felt treated with dignity and respect.
• Patients were able to access suitable nutrition and hydration, including special diets, and they reported that, on the whole, they were content with the quality and quantity of food.
• There were processes for implementing and monitoring the use of evidence-based guidelines and standards to meet patients’ care needs.
• There was effective communication and collaboration between multidisciplinary teams across the services and within the community.
• We found the hospital was visibly clean however there were concerns regarding the type of seats in the outpatients departments which were contrary to infection control best practice guidelines.
• There was good multidisciplinary working. The elderly medical strategy included the development of community schemes. An example of this was already in place, and involved working with a nursing home that provided interim less clinical placements for patients who were not ready for active rehabilitation. Patients who were non-weight bearing for a period of time could be cared for in a more homely environment until they were able to weight bear. Patients would then be transferred back to Bridlington Hospital for proactive rehabilitation with a planned expected date of discharge.
• Surgical nursing staff raised concerns about staff being regularly moved at short notice to cover staffing shortages on medical and surgical wards in Scarborough. Staff said that they were moved to areas outside their area of clinical expertise. There were some staff shortages on the medical wards.

However, there were also areas of poor practice where the trust needs to make improvements. Importantly, the trust must:

• Ensure that there are sufficient numbers of suitably skilled, qualified and experienced staff, in line with best practice and national guidance, taking into account patients’ dependency levels
• Review the uptake and monitoring of training, and ensure that staff at Bridlington Hospital are compliant with mandatory training requirements, especially in the areas of moving and handling, fire safety, safeguarding vulnerable adults, and safeguarding children.

In addition there were actions the trust should take and these are listed at the end of the report.

Professor Sir Mike Richards

Chief Inspector of Hospitals