Wigan's hospital trust gets top marks for cleanliness in annual assessment

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust (WWL) scored 100 per cent for cleanliness in a recent assessment – putting it in joint first place with four other trusts in England.

Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE) were carried out across all of the trust’s sites late last year, including, for the first time, the Thomas Linacre Centre and six community premises.

They involve local people – known as patient assessors – going into hospitals to see how the environment supports the provision of clinical care, assessing things such as privacy and dignity, food, cleanliness and general building maintenance, and the extent to which the environment can support the care of those with dementia.

Overall, the trust was placed third highest in the North West and fifth out of all NHS acute/specialist trusts in England – up from fourth regionally and seventh nationally in previous assessments.

Condition, appearance and maintenance scored highly at 99.94 per cent, which placed WWL second in the country.

Its dementia score was 95.4 per cent, disability access came in second at 98.39 per cent and the privacy and dignity score was 89.81 per cent

Overall, the trust’s food average score was 95.65 per cent. The assessment is made up of three areas – food (95.65 per cent), organisational food (94.92) and ward food (96.2).

John Fairhurst, director of estates and facilities at the trust, said: “Without doubt, to score 100 per cent in cleanliness, putting us in the top five of all acute and community NHS trusts in the country, is outstanding and is a real credit to the hard work and dedication of our outstanding estates and facilities teams.

“A huge amount of daily effort goes into creating a safe space for our patients and the scores from this assessment really do reflect that hard work.

“Whilst we are very proud, we also know that there are still areas to improve on in readiness for the next inspection.”

PLACE assessments focus exclusively on the environment in which care is delivered and do not cover clinical care provision or how well staff do their jobs.