THE boss of Warrington Hospital says there were hundreds of inaccuracies in a report on the trust by the Care Quality Commission.

Speaking at an inquiry into the commission’s effectiveness, Mel Pickup stated that she believed there were 210 inaccuracies in the independent health care regulator’s report on Warrington Hospital, with some claims ‘wildly inaccurate’.

Ms Pickup, the chief executive of Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, also described inspectors as ‘intense and intrusive’ and believed that the timing of the inspection was ‘not the easiest’.

The trust’s three sites were visited by 42 CQC inspectors in January this year, with the subsequent report stating that the hospital required improvement.

Speaking at the inquiry, Ms Pickup said: “A number of areas that we felt we had done quite well in were found to be requiring improvement.

“When the reports came we went through them to check for factual inaccuracies and we submitted about 210 of those – some of them were wildly inaccurate, where the numbers or the data were wrong.”

Of the 210 inaccuracies highlighted 64 per cent were upheld.

Ms Pickup stated that some issues she informed CQC inspectors about were not included in their report.

She added: “I was very open and upfront – in fact, in the feedback that we got when the draft report was about to be published fewer issues were brought to our attention by the CQC than I had brought to its attention.”

The CQC’s latest report into Warrington Hospital raised concerns around safety, responsiveness and leadership.

It also highlighted surgery, critical care, maternity and gynaecology and outpatients as requiring improvement.

Ms Pickup added: “If you could choose when you might have your inspection the middle of January is not necessarily the easiest time – people will be well aware that this particular January was a real challenge for acute trusts.

“I have had a number of dealings in the past with the Care Quality Commission so I anticipated that our inspection would be somewhat of an ordeal and I found it not to be so.

“There has been a tangible change in the style and methodology used throughout the inspections, although that is not to say that they are not robust in the extreme and are quite intense and intrusive.”

The CQC has been at the centre of scrutiny by the House of Commons’ Public Account Committee, of which Warrington South MP David Mowat is a member.

New concerns around the CQC were expressed in a report that was released today, which said that while the regulator has made ‘substantial progress’ it is ‘behind where it should be’ and is ‘not yet an effective regulator’.

Ms Pickup also stated that the CQC had a tendency to rely on anecdotal evidence which could portray an inaccurate picture of the health care provided.

She said: “Staff reported quite positively at the end of the experience that the inspectors seemed very well informed and interested in what the staff had to say and that they were looking for really good things and good examples as well as wanting to know what the issues were but I think there is a tendency to rely on anecdote and to quote comment made by individuals.

“Running hospitals is very difficult at the moment and you cannot have all the staff on board with everything that you are doing all the time – having to make massive cost savings is not easy when the majority of your costs are around staff salaries.”

“They know that there are changes that they have to make, not all of which the staff are on board for, and a disgruntled member of staff may make a very damaging comment that gets translated in the report as an overall theme – that is an issue.”

Ms Pickup told the Warrington Guardian: "I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to the Public Accounts Committee about our experience as an acute trust going through its first formal CQC inspection.

"We found the inspection to be robust and an overall positive experience.

"There were a number of inaccuracies that we brought to the CQCs attention in their first draft report before it was published and some of these were changed in the final report.

"Speaking to the committee was all about providing constructive feedback on how we found the inspection process and looking at how it could be improved in the future."