Bucks Healthcare Trust has gone from requiring improvement to being rated as good – but inspectors have called for action to improve staffing levels in their community hospitals.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) visited the Trust during February and march and inspected urgent and emergency care, medical care, surgery, outpatients, and end of life care including the hospice within Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Inspectors also visited the trust’s community services - community adults and community children and young people.

Overall, CQC rated the Trust as outstanding for caring, good for being safe, effective, responsive to people’s needs, and requires improvement for being well led.

It comes after the Trust were given a disappointing ‘requires improvement’ rating overall in 2016.

Following the inspection, CQC used its urgent powers to impose conditions on the Trust’s registration to ensure there were enough qualified therapy staff throughout the community health inpatient wards at Amersham Hospital to support the care and treatment of patients.

They must make sure they have safe staffing levels, including enough trained staff so patients can receive physiotherapy.

Where the actual nurse staffing levels have fallen below safe levels - the Trust must detail what action was taken to ensure the staff to patient ratios were safe.

Dr Nigel Acheson, CQC’s deputy chief inspector of hospitals, said there had been “significant improvements” in urgent and emergency care, medical care, surgery and outpatients.

Chief executive Neil Macdonald said: “This is wonderful news and is testament to the hard work of everyone in the Trust, our volunteers, partners and supporters. It is fantastic that we have been recognised as ‘Outstanding’ for caring.

“In particular, it is wonderful that our end of life service has been recognised as being outstanding and other service areas, including the emergency department, outpatient service and adult community health services have been recognised for outstanding areas of practice.

“Today marks another key milestone for us. The news that our progress has been recognised will give everyone at BHT a real boost and our patients greater confidence that the improvements we’re making on a daily basis are making a real difference to those for whom we care.”