Archived: The Hospital Group - Liverpool Clinic

Updated 26 April 2019

The Hospital Group - Liverpool Clinic is part of a corporate organisation named Combine Opco trading as The Hospital Group . The service provides a number of treatments including  pre and post-operative consultations, wound care management and gastric band adjustment. Adults only aged 18 years are treated here. The service is open Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm and on Saturday and Sunday they are open from 10am to 6pm. Patients have access to an on-call nurse for emergencies at all times.

The clinic is registered with CQC to provide the following regulated activities:

• Treatment of disease, disorder or injury

The provider 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.

Updated 26 April 2019

We undertook comprehensive inspections of The Hospital Group - Liverpool Clinic

on 22 November 2017 and 2 February 2018 under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. At this time, we found that effective, caring, responsive and well led services were provided however, safe care was not being delivered in accordance with relevant regulations.

The full comprehensive report following the inspection on 22 November 2017 and 2 February 2018 can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for The Hospital Group - Liverpool Clinic on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

We carried out an announced focused inspection of The Hospital Group - Liverpool Clinic on 14 February 2019 to confirm that the clinic had carried out their plan to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breaches in regulations identified in our previous inspection. Our key findings were as follows:

• Action had been taken from the previous inspection with some improvements shown on the follow up for this inspection.

• Safeguarding policies and procedures were up to date to ensure patients were protected from abuse and improper treatment. Since the last inspection staff had completed updated adult and children’s safeguarding training. However, we were unable to verify the level of children’s safeguarding and if this was appropriate for the clinicians working at the clinic.

We also looked at action taken in response to the recommendations we had made to the provider following the last inspection visit. We found:

• Patient information about how to make a complaint had been reviewed. This information was now added to the clinic website. We were assured that if a patient asked to make a formal complaint they would be directed to the clinic website or to the terms and conditions in their initial health assessment contract.

• Plans were in place to implement clinical supervision for clinic nurses. Information was provided following the inspection to show that systems were being developed.

• The systems and processes in place to ensure good governance required further improvements. Monitoring arrangements had been reviewed and we saw evidence that the provider Medical Advisory Committee had oversight of all quality improvement activities. However, there was no evidence of clinical audit activity and further work was required to demonstrate a robust quality assurance process was in place.

We identified regulations that were not being met and the provider must:

• Ensure patients are protected from abuse and improper treatment.

In addition, the provider should:

• Review the service quality improvement activities to ensure care and services are measured against evidence base standards. Ideally, a clinical audit is a continuous cycle should be put into place that is continuously measured with improvements made after each cycle.

Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP

Chief Inspector of General Practice