Sheffield Children’s praised for kindness and compassion as CQC confirms “Good” rating

Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has been awarded the Care Quality Commission (CQC) ‘Good’ rating once again after a series of visits across the Trust.

The inspectors found areas of outstanding practice and praised the compassion and kindness of staff.

The CQC said:

• Children, young people, families and carers were supported, treated with dignity and respect and were involved as partners in their care.
• Staff provided emotional support to patients, families and carers to minimise their distress.
• Staff cared for patients with compassion. Feedback from patients confirmed that staff treated them well and with kindness.
• Staff involved patients and those close to them in decisions about their care and treatment.
• Managers across the Trust promoted a positive culture that supported and valued staff, creating a sense of common purpose based on shared values.
• Services had enough staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep people safe from avoidable harm and to provide the right care and treatment.

Sheffield Children’s is delighted to retain its ‘Good’ rating for the services it provides to children and young people across South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, across the UK and internationally.

Sheffield Children’s is one of three dedicated children’s hospital trusts in the UK. It provides acute and community services for children and young people in Sheffield and South Yorkshire, as well as specialised services for patients further afield. As well as the Sheffield Children’s Hospital – which contains the emergency department, theatres, and wide range of specialist services such as support for children with cystic fibrosis, spinal issues or cancer, it also has inpatient child and adolescent mental health services at the Becton Centre and provides respite care at Ryegate House. In addition, care is provided to children and young people in their own homes and at clinics across the city.

Sally Shearer, Executive Director of Nursing and Quality at Sheffield Children’s said: “I am incredibly proud of all our staff across the Trust committing to supporting children and young people every day.

“Across the Trust our staff are committed to excellence, teamwork, accountability, compassion and integrity. Our feedback and rating from the CQC reflects this and our work to continuously improve services. The rating also provides an opportunity for reflection, and we continue to strive for improvement throughout the Trust to provide the best care for our patients.

“Sheffield Children’s is leading innovative research and projects with partners across the globe to help advance healthcare for children, as well as providing daily support to patients and their families in our state-of-the-art facilities. Our ‘Good’ rating is thanks to the contributions of everyone across each site and each team and we’re celebrating the work we all do to provide excellent care to children and young people locally, regionally, nationally and internationally every day.”

Effective, caring, responsive and well-led were rated as ‘Good’, while safe is rated as requires improvement. All these ratings were the same as the previous inspection with the exception of safe, which had improved one rating.

Since the previous inspection in 2016, transition services and child and adolescent mental health wards had undertaken significant work and improved one rating from requires improvement to ‘Good’ overall.

The CQC also found outstanding practice in services at the Trust. They said:

Transition Services

• The service had set up systems to ensure that the voice of young people was heard in the transition service strategy. For example, the youth forum had approved the Trust transition policy.
• Specialist services evidenced outstanding health promotion activities for young people who had reached the age of transition. This included the liver service that provided an animation-based education tool, and the diabetic service that ran a course in the school holidays to provide young people with further information about their condition.
• There was a ‘burns club’ where young people in transition could socialise. This helped to reduce feelings of isolation and anxiety.

In Outpatients

• The Trust had considered how to address the challenges around ‘was not brought’ to appointments and reduce the numbers of people who did not attend for appointments. 

The full report can be found on the CQC website.