Queen’s Hospital’s urgent treatment centre has again been rated ‘requires improvement’ following an inspection.

This comes in a recent Care Quality Commission (CQC) report written after a series of visits between November 10 and December 8 last year.

The Partnership of East London Cooperatives (PELC), which runs the centre, said since the inspections it has made further improvements and remains “committed to working closely with the trust to deliver a continuing enhancement of quality and safety of care given to patients”.

Just two out of the five criteria it was assessed on were deemed to be ‘good’, with its overall rating, just as it was in a previous inspection in 2021, noted as ‘requires improvement’.

In the time since that last report, the CQC said some of the breaches of regulation had been addressed, but others had not and new breaches had been found.

Its performance in relation to the safety, effectiveness and how well-led its services are came under particular scrutiny.

Issues including staff compliance over handwashing, complaints from some personnel that they were not being listened to and concerns about staffing procedures were raised by the CQC.

The report did praise how caring and responsive the services were, with patients able to access care and treatment and staff understanding patients’ needs well.

The urgent treatment centre is not alone in being rated 'requires improvement' by the CQC.

The emergency department at Queen's, which is run by the Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT), was also issued the rating after inspections late last year.

Having taken over the running of the site in July 2020, the PELC said it is “extremely proud of the hard work of all members of staff (including our NELFT [North East London NHS Foundation Trust] partners) and all that has been achieved in the short time we have run the service, especially in light of the significant pressure the Covid-19 pandemic placed on everyone".

Since receiving the report, it said it is in the process of “agreeing a formal action plan with them [the CQC] to address the specific issues they have highlighted in the shortest possible time”.