East of England Hyperbaric Unit

Updated 12 November 2019

East of England Hyperbaric is operated by London Hyperbaric Medicine London Hyperbaric Medicine (LHM) Healthcare Ltd. The service opened in 2008. It is a privately-operated unit based within an NHS trust in Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk. Referrals are taken from across the region and nationally. The service is delivered in partnership with the host NHS trust. It is integrated with the hospital’s critical care and emergency medicine department under the clinical leadership of NHS consultants based at the hospital. The unit provides emergency services for deep sea divers with disorders requiring compression and emergency treatment for patients with carbon monoxide poisoning, gas embolism and necrotizing soft tissue infections. Non-emergency treatment is available for a range of conditions including complications resulting from the use of radiation in cancer treatment, osteomyelitis, problem wounds that are not healing, and diabetic foot ulcers.

The service has had a registered manager in post since 2008 and is registered for the regulated activity of treatment of disease, disorder or injury. The service was last inspected in September 2015 and was meeting all standards.

Updated 12 November 2019

East of England Hyperbaric is operated by London Hyperbaric Medicine (LHM) Healthcare Ltd. The service provides hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy for up to seven patients per session in a multiplace hyperbaric chamber.

The service provides HBO services for adults and children from the East Anglia region and across the country.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection on 22 August 2019 along with an unannounced visit to the unit on 5 September 2019.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Services we do not rate

We regulate hyperbaric oxygen therapy services, but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them when they are provided as a single specialty service. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• Patient feedback about the service was consistently positive.

• Staff spoke positively about the culture of the service.

• Staff completed thorough risk assessments for each patient using the service.

• Equipment records, and policies were detailed and up to date.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• Staff could not easily access the resuscitation equipment trolley.

• There were no historic records of resuscitation equipment checks as staff completed these on laminated sheets which they wiped clean at the end of each month.

• The risk register did not identify risks to the service and had not been recently reviewed and updated.

• There was little evidence of sharing of learning from incidents.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. Details are at the end of the report.

Heidi Smoult

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals

Updated 8 December 2015

The clinical lead and registered manager provide strong leadership to the small and effective team. There was a positive ethos of providing good quality care and staff were caring and compassionate. Patients were positive about the care and treatment that they had received.

There was careful attention to all aspects of safety. Risks were identified and actions were taken to reduce them.

The service was responsive to patients’ needs. Patients received prompt treatment and cancellations were rare. The service was accessible and the unit could be available for use for emergency patients in about an hour.

Staff told us that they received good quality training. They were expected to complete mandatory training in their substantive posts within the James Paget hospital, and received specialist hyperbaric training from the provider.

The service was actively looking for ways to further improve and took patients’ and staff comments into account.