Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich has been criticised in another damning report.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) said the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust again “requires improvement”, with special attention paid to services at the Woolwich hospital.

A previous report in November 2016 revealed patients at the hospital were sleeping in dirty incontinence pads and waiting up to two months to have their hair washed.

The new report said that since an earlier report in 2014 which called Queen Elizabeth Hospital "not fit for purpose" the trust "has found it hard to sustain any further improvements.”

The management came under fire, with the report saying that “a lack of decisive decision-making by the trust leadership team contributed to a lack of overall progress across the organisation.”

Urgent and emergency services, medical care, surgery, critical care and services for children and young people were all rated as requiring improvement.

End-of-life care was rated as inadequate, the worst rating the CQC hands out, with the report saying staff “did not always demonstrate a caring approach to patients and did not always maintain patients’ privacy and dignity.”

It found “persistent confusion with regards to the nature of end-of-life care services” and that there were “gaps in understanding of how to initiate the end-of-life care pathway among some medical staff”.

Other examples of poor work included the cleanliness of the environment in maternity and gynaecology, even on surfaces where green 'I am clean' stickers had been placed on them.

It wasn’t all bad, with community services being rated as outstanding overall, attributed to the leadership of children, young people and family community services provided in Lewisham.

The trust has admitted it needs to improve, and has said it has already introduced a number of new measures.

These include ensuring patients coming through emergency departments are treated in a timelier manner, making sure safety checks are carried out consistently, and running major recruitment campaigns locally.

Dr Elizabeth Aitken, medical director for Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, said: “The CQC report shows that we were not getting it right for every patient every time when the inspection was carried out.

“We apologise to the individual patients and their families where the report shows that we were failing to provide the best care.

“We launched a major safety and quality improvement plan immediately after the CQC inspection in March and have made significant improvements for patients.

“This is a joint plan with our health and social care partners to make the improvements needed across the whole system to address the issues raised by the CQC.

“The CQC report also acknowledges several areas of good and outstanding practice and highlights many areas where Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has improved since the last Trust-wide inspection in 2014. We are extremely proud of our staff who work so hard, often under significant pressures.”