West Herts Trust gets low ratings for food, privacy and dignity
- The West Herts Trust was crowned ‘Trust of the Year’ recently, seeing solid improvements to A&E waiting times and other clinical performance scores
- But patients – and staff – don’t seem too impressed with other things, to judge by a recent survey
- The Trust struggled in parts of the 2025 Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE) Programme. These assessments are ‘an annual appraisal of the non-clinical aspects of NHS and independent/private healthcare settings’
- The assessors are teams made up of members of the public (known as patient assessors) and staff.
- West Herts was among England’s bottom five on privacy, dignity and wellbeing, with a rating of 78.29% against a national average of 89%
- That was 13% better than the 2024 score, when West Herts was the worst acute trust in the country
- Food at West Herts scored 84.04%, against a national average of about 92%
- Cleanliness was slightly above the average, at 98.75%.
- The Health Service Journal article on the PLACE ratings is here: