Patient safety at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust has been branded ‘inadequate’ by inspectors.

The trust, which serves half a million people, was rated inadequate against criteria measuring patient safety and outpatient services.

A&E, medical care, surgery and children and young people’s services and responsiveness were also found to need improvement at the trust which runs City, Sandwell and Rowley Regis hospitals.

Critical care, end of life care and the effective and caring nature of services were rated ‘good’ in the inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Professor Sir Mike Richards, the health watchdog’s chief inspector of hospitals, said: “Overall, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust was found to require improvement but our inspection rated the trust as ‘inadequate’ with regard to safety.

“While we witnessed areas of good practice it is clear that the trust has work to do to makes improvements which are sustainable long term”.

He added: “People deserve to be treated in services which are safe, caring, effective, well-led, and responsive to their needs and this is what we look at when we carry out our inspections.”

The trust’s overall rating was given as ‘requires improvement’ in the report released this week.

The leadership has been ordered to ensure nursing staffing levels are safe, incidents are reported and that information about patients is handled and stored correctly,

Practices related to the way the trust uses data – including records used to assess patients – must also be improved along with staff understanding of isolation procedures.

Medicine storage and security was judged to be “chaotic” at City Hospital and “inconsistent” across both acute sites and in the community.

Record-keeping formed a key area of concern with “serious breaches” in storage of patient notes which had not been secured or were missing. Looming job cuts of 1,400 over the next five years were found to be a problem, with “poor morale” for staff fearing redundancy and a lack of nurses causing an issue in some areas of the trust.

However, the trust, which provides services in the west of the city and six towns in Sandwell, was found to be ‘outstanding’ in its ICARES scheme for adults with long-term conditions and in its “compassionate and caring dedication for end of life care”.

The leadership of the governing trust has now pledged to address the concerns.

Chief executive Toby Lewis said: “The first important point the report makes is that our 7,500 staff are distinctively caring. The second point that the report makes is that the trust as a whole has room for improvement.

“There are lots of things that we do well but there are lots of things that we could do better and don’t always do right 100 per cent of the time.

“The third point is that our out-of-hospital services, our community services, which is more than half of the work that we do as an NHS provider, are rated as good.

“Within that room for improvement, the CQC identifies some specific issues that it wants us to address. Those are issues such as making sure that our hand-washing is consistent across the organisation, which is an infection issue, and making sure that we always lock our drugs cabinets, which is a medicines security issue,” he added.