Wembley Park

Updated 5 April 2022

Nova Healthcare Solutions Ltd (the provider) is a registered company whose registered office is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. It provides a range of mostly administrative support services to NHS GPs under individual contractual arrangements. The provider moved its operational base in September 2021 to offices at Unit A Shams Court, 25 Fulton Road, Wembley HA9 0GA.

The provider is registered by the CQC in respect of the regulated activity Treatment of disease, disorder or injury. The service it provides to contracted practices is for the most part administrative support, involving workflow management and coding of clinical documents received by the practices. The provider offers four levels of workflow management services, each being subject to an agreed trial period. The standard hours of operation are 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, Monday to Friday. In addition, the provider offers a triaging service involving the processing of online consultation tickets generated by patients registered with the contracted general practice using the eConsult online system. This system was widely adopted by the NHS at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Only this latter service, which at the time of the inspection was limited to one contracted practice, involves any direct contact with patients. Clinical responsibility for patients’ healthcare remains with the contracted practice, which includes making any necessary referrals to secondary care.

The provider’s staff is made up of two directors, both of whom are doctors registered by the General Medical Council (GMC) and currently working in NHS general practice; a general manager; a processing lead; three medical administrator supervisors; fourteen medical administrators; and an office technician . There are also three medical administrator bank staff. An advanced nurse practitioner was recently appointed, and further recruitment of medical administrators was ongoing at the time of the inspection.

One of the directors is the registered manager. A registered manager is a person who is registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are “registered persons”. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

How we inspected this service

Before the inspection we gathered and reviewed information requested from the provider. At our site visit on 3 March 2022, we spoke with the provider’s two directors, the general manager and the processing lead. We subsequently spoke with the general manger and other staff members using online conferencing.

To get to the heart of service users’ experiences, we ask the following five questions:

• Is it safe?
• Is it effective?
• Is it caring?
• Is it responsive to people’s needs?
• Is it well-led?

These questions therefore formed the framework for the areas we looked at during the inspection.

Updated 5 April 2022

We rated the service as Good overall. It had not been inspected previously.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection of the service commencing with a site visit on 3 March 2022, as part of our inspection programme. This was the first inspection of the service.

Nova Healthcare Solutions Ltd (the provider) was registered by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in November 2020 in respect of the regulated activity Treatment of disease, disorder or injury. It provides support to NHS GP services under individual contractual arrangements entered into by the practices. This mostly involves a workflow management service to process and code clinical documents received by the contracting practices. In addition, at the time of our inspection it also provided an online triaging of eConsult requests to one contracted GP service.

At this inspection we found:

• The provider had good systems to manage risk. It learned from incidents and took action to improve processes.
• The provider routinely reviewed the effectiveness of the service by regular spot checks and auditing.
• Care and treatment was delivered in accordance with evidence-based guidelines.
• Feedback from service users was positive regarding responsive aspects of the service.
• There was a strong focus on continuous learning and improvement at all levels.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Arrange for the named safeguarding leads to undertake level four training.
• Continue with plans for the regular review of governance policies, system guidance manuals and training materials.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care