The East Surrey Hospital in Redhill has been rated as one of the safest hospitals in England by health watchdog the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The CQC has stated that it has no concerns about the safety, quality and effectiveness of the care provided by Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the East Surrey.

The Trust got the best score possible in the CQC's latest risk rating, meaning its patients are in one of the safest hospitals in the country according to the watchdog's ‘intelligent monitoring.’ The CQC take the results of their ‘intelligent monitoring’ and group the country's 161 acute NHS trusts into six bands, based on the risk that people might not be receiving safe, effective, high quality care, with band 1 being the highest risk and band 6 the lowest.

Michael Wilson, chief executive of Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “Our focus is always patient safety, the quality of our services, clinical effectiveness and our patients’ over-all experience, so it’s no surprise that we have maintained our position as one of the safest trusts in the country.”

He continued: “We are not complacent, however, and we know there is always more we can do, but this banding is the result of a lot of hard work and I want to thank all of the staff that have made a difference in our trust.”

Mr Wilson said: “When the CQC created their risk rating in October last year, we were deemed one of the safest trusts, but there were four areas highlighted that we could improve. “In this latest review, all but one very minor point remains unresolved, and once we’ve submitted the data to correct this point we will have a complete clean bill of health.”

The CQC’s judgements take the results of their ‘intelligent monitoring’ and reports from other organisations into account.

‘Intelligent monitoring’ is based on 150 indicators that look at a range of information including patient experience, staff experience and statistical measures of performance. The CQC’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards, said: “Our ‘intelligent monitoring’ helps to give us a good picture of risk within trusts, showing us where we need to focus our inspections.” The reports for each trust are available to view online at: www.cqc.org.uk/media/hospital-imonitoring As well as the East Surrey Hospital, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust provides a range of services at hospitals in Crawley, Horsham, Dorking, Caterham and the Oxted Health Centre. It has a growing catchment population of 535,000 residents in East Surrey and North-east West Sussex and is the designated hospital for Gatwick Airport and the M25.

The Trust employs about 3,500 staff and has an annual budget of about £220 million delivering NHS services. Website: www.surreyandsussex.nhs.uk