HEALTH watchdogs have slammed hospital bosses in Andover after they found that the town’s hospital “requires improvement”.

Inspectors from the Care Quality Commission visited the Andover War Memorial Hospital and found that two core areas needed improvement.

Now a hospital campaigner has said “enough is enough” and is glad to see that inspectors have said that changes need to be made.

Daniel Emmerson, chairman of the UKIP’s North West Hampshire branch said: “We need better services here in Andover. The town is growing too rapidly.”

While he agreed that the report may be difficult reading for some staff he said: “I know that people working in the hospital are excellent but we need an accident and emergency department that doesn’t require improvement.”

But the trust which runs the hospital along with Winchester’s Royal Hampshire County hospital and Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital – Hampshire Hospitals NHS Trust – was rated as “outstanding”.Chief executive Mary Edwards, said people should look beyond the “headline rating”.

She highlighted that the hospital had been rated as “outstanding”

for End of Life Care and that care across the Charlton Road hospital was rated highly.

She said: “I think the staff will be disappointed, everybody wants to be rated as “good” particularly as one single rating doesn’t demonstrate all the detail.”

Two areas at the centre – urgent and emergency services, and surgery – required improvement.

Mrs Edwards said they were aware of the issues and that work was already under being done to improve that.

At the Minor Injuries Unit, the services were “good for caring and responsive services” but that improvements to “provide safe, effective and well-led care”

needed to be made.

Some of the issues highlighted were: l There were insufficient processes for identifying, assessing and managing risks in the service l Staff did not feel their concerns were managed effectively and this had impacted on staff morale l Processes to protect patients from risks were not always followed l There was no record of the daily check of resuscitation equipment, and some items in the resuscitation trolley were found out of date.

For surgery there were also areas of concern in the report: l The service was currently using less than 50 per cent of its theatre capacity l Some referral to treatment times were no being met in orthopaedic surgery and ophthalmology and patients were waiting more than 18 weeks for surgery – treatment times were met in other departments l Operations and procedures were cancelled on day of surgery because patient records weren’t always available l The day care unit did not provide separate or same-sex facility as care was provided in an open unit which may compromise patients’ privacy and dignity.

Mrs Edwards said that the report didn’t “find anything that caused patients harm” and most of the issues were regarding paperwork.

She added: “We’re never complacent.

What I’m pleased about is that the CQC didn’t find anything that we didn’t know we needed to improve. They recognise that we are working to improve certain issues.”