Last night, councillors on Wirral Council’s Health and Wellbeing Committee expressed their concern at not knowing about an inspection report highlighting failures in safeguarding at Kent House, Oxton, Wirral until January 2012 during a joint health committee meeting of Wirral and Cheshire Council. Kent House is a Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust inpatient facility providing services for adults with a learning disability.
The Chair, Cllr Patricia Glasman was most concerned that the Health and Wellbeing Committee had known nothing about this until months after the critical inspection had happened. The new Director of Adult Social Services said that he would make sure that these sorts of things were brought to the Committee’s attention in the future.
The Chief Executive Sheena Cumiskey and Andy Styring, Director of Operations at Kent House answered questions from the committee and detailed what had been done since the September inspection to achieve compliance. The initial unannounced inspection had found that Kent House was falling short in the areas of care and welfare of patients who use their services, safeguarding people who used the services from abuse and the quality of services provided.
However since then, improvements had been made and a later re-inspection on 13th December 2011 showed that Kent House had made improvements in the area of safeguarding.