A SPECIALIST mental health hospital has been revisited by the health watchdog after they were served a warning notice for the unsafe management of medicine earlier this year.

St Mary's Hospital in Orford provides care and treatment for those with a acquired brain injuries and autistic spectrum conditions.

The 67-bed hospital was issued with a warning notice in in March and rated inadequate for patient safety.

On this inspection in August, the CQC checked whether the improvements had been made to the most serious concerns relating to the management of medicines.

They found that the provider had taken sufficient action to address the issues raised but there were still some minor shortfalls.

Staff reviewed and recorded patient blood results for patients on clozapine and lithium and have developed systems to record blood results and checks on patients on high dose antipsychotics.

Managers had also put improved systems in place to notify us of safeguarding incidents.

They had improved their oversight of safeguarding incidents and were supported to meet their responsibilities by a safeguarding lead social worker.

More recent local safeguarding investigations showed more robust investigation, action and oversight.

However, there were still some minor shortfalls in medicines management including staff not completing proper individualised review of antipsychotics care plans.

Managers still need to improve the audit trails when blood results are awaiting review and clinicians need to rationalise the necessity for several blood tests, where possible.

Where safeguarding incidents had been considered locally, managers recognised that they tended to focus on personnel factors when looking at the incidents instead of wider root cause analysis to consider organisational and systemic factors as part of their investigations.

Patients were not spoken to on this inspection as it was based solely on systems and records to see if managers had made improvements.

A spokesperson for Elysium Healthcare said: "Elysium acquired St Mary’s Hospital in August 2018.

"The hospital immediately began a process of transitioning onto new systems and structures which would improve the service but these had not been realised at the time of the initial inspection in March 2019.

"Despite this, St Marys has made good progress over the year in relation to key improvements in a number of areas and this is acknowledged in the CQC report from their follow up visit in August 2019.

"Although the hospital has improved, the CQC rating does not change until the CQC carry out an inspection which reviews all of the aspects within the domain.

"We also fully accept that there are further improvements to be made and we continue to work in partnership with the CQC and our NHS partners to deliver these.

"Our managers and staff are fully committed to ensuring that the hospital delivers, safe, effective, caring, responsive and well lead services."