8 July 2016

For immediate release

CNWL's Annual report published - From Chief Executive Claire Murdoch

CNWL's Annual Report was laid before Parliament on Wednesday 6 July and it is published on our website today.

I hope you will take the time to look through it and look forward to your views about it at our Annual General Meeting on Wednesday 7 September, starting at 5pm, at the Royal College of GPs, Euston Square.

In the Quality Account section we publish stakeholder views exactly as sent. One of them says, "We are disappointed that the Trust only came 125th (out of 230 Trusts) and said to have ‘significant concerns' in the Learning from Mistakes league."

I share that concern and am frustrated because that ‘position' is based on a technical problem; I took the issue up with the Secretary of State himself too because these tables are very important.

I want to strongly reiterate that we stand by high standards of transparency and learning; I accept all that lies behind measuring them but want our score to reflect what actually goes on.

The League table used a formula based on three scores in the NHS Staff Survey; in our case, staff rated us ‘above average' but then our rating was subjected to deductions for ‘red flags'.

We couldn't upload data when we were upgrading our system. We asked for national help to fix the issue but they tried and couldn't. Even though we had all our data entered on our system as usual, the national system couldn't upload it. This counted as though we were not reporting any incidents at all, so it flagged as a lack of transparency ‘concern' on the league table. This took us from being in the top quartile to number 125 in the table. (121 and above being good and all below 121 being cause for concern.) 

The League Table is a good thing but all the scores should be included and if they had we would have been rated good; which is what we are.

Editors' notes

The Annual Report 2015 - 16 is available by clicking on this link.

Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust
Stephenson House, 75 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PL
Tel: 020 3214 5756 e-mail:communications.cnwl@nhs.net