- NHS hospital
Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham
Report from 21 January 2025 assessment
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
This was a service assessment of surgery and urgent and emergency care services only. Please see the summaries below for these services. The location rating of ‘requires improvement' includes an aggregation of ratings for all assessment service groups for Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, others which were inspected previously to these new assessments.
Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham is an acute hospital in Edgbaston in the West Midlands. The hospital is part of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and provides a range of outpatient, inpatient and urgent and emergency care for its local community in and around Edgbaston and also a regional and national population for some services provided . The hospital is a designated level 1 trauma centre.
We completed an unannounced assessment of urgent and emergency care services and surgery on 19 and 20 March 2025. We assessed urgent and emergency services as a follow up to our previous inspection and to determine if improvements had been made. Our assessment of surgery was carried out as this is a major service for this hospital and we had not assessed the service since 2019. Based on our previous inspection for urgent and emergency services, we looked at specific quality statements in safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. As this assessment was based on risk, we only completed quality statements which were connected to the areas of concern or considered pivotal for this service. For surgery we looked at a wider range of quality statements.
At this inspection, urgent and emergency care services remained requires improvement, but the rating for safe improved from inadequate to requires improvement with improvements seen in areas of concern. Caring stayed the same at good and effective improved from requires improvement to good. Well led remained requires improvement. Responsive remained requires improvement with the department under significant system pressures, crowding and a lack of flow which meant there were long waits in the department due to a lack of available beds elsewhere in the hospital. However, there had been progress made and the department had improved, although there were still areas of concern to address. We served the trust with breaches of 3 regulations around the failure to provide timely treatment, not always having safe staffing levels, and improvements needed in governance.
In surgery, safe remained requires improvement. Effective and caring remained good. Responsive declined to requires improvement from good, and well-led remained rated as good. Overall the service dropped from a good rating to requires improvement. We served the trust with breaches within 1 regulation in relation to some people not getting timely care, medicines not being managed safely at all times, and anaesthetic equipment not being checked as required at all times.