• Doctor
  • Independent doctor

IntraHealth East Lancs Office

Overall: Good read more about inspection ratings

Unit 21, Bancroft Road, Burnley, BB10 2TP 0333 358 3397

Provided and run by:
IntraHealth Limited

Latest inspection summary

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Background to this inspection

Updated 16 May 2023

IntraHealth East Lancs Office provides a bespoke NHS England commissioned School Aged Immunisation Service (SAIS) to the children and young people living within the East Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen localities. The registered office for the service is located at Unit 21, Bancroft Road, Burnley BB10 2TP.

The service visits schools and community venues to vaccinate children and young people but also run clinics in other locations such as their own office clinic, community centres and in the child or young person’s home on occasion. The vaccines are stored at the office location.

IntraHealth Ltd is the CQC registered provider for the service and they provide a range of primary health care services across the north of England

The service is registered to provide the following regulated activities:

  • Treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

The East Lancs vaccination team operate vaccination clinics in primary and secondary schools, and at other locations to deliver vaccinations against common infectious diseases such as meningitis, polio, diphtheria, flu and HPV. A timetable for the administration of the different vaccinations is followed with Diphtheria, Tetanus and Polio (DTP) and meningococcal bacteria -, (MenACWY) vaccinations take place in the first quarter of the year followed by HPV in the months of April to July. Measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) catch up takes place in June and July, followed by general catch ups for all missed vaccinations during July and August. This is followed by the flu vaccinations which takes place from September to December. The school vaccination teams visit each school in accordance with a schedule agreed with each school.

The service provides a vaccination programme to 233 primary schools offering vaccinations to 50,400 young children each year and to 24068 secondary school children attending the 68 secondary schools in the localities. If a child or young person misses their vaccination, additional clinics are set up in community venues and in schools to offer an additional opportunity to receive a vaccination.

During March 2023 the service undertook 2153 vaccinations for DTP, MenACWY and HPV. The biggest cohort of vaccinations is for flu vaccinations, the service delivered 5,000 per week during the period from September 2022 to December 2022.

Access to the service is facilitated through the child and young person’s school. Contact is made with parents and caregivers to obtain consent and then the child attended the pre-planned session in their school. Catch up sessions were arranged periodically if vaccinations had been missed.

Information about the SAIS service can be found on the provider’s website: https://www.intrahealth.co.uk/clinical-services/patients/immunisation-vaccination/

How we inspected this service

Before the inspection we spoke with a number of staff including the clinical director for IntraHealth Ltd, the registered manager and members of the nursing and administration team. We reviewed a wide range of documents and risk assessments received before our inspection, observed staff undertaking a young people’s vaccination clinic within a secondary school and we spoke with staff at the office for the service.

As part of this inspection we visited and observed a clinic in a local school to observe the vaccination clinic taking place there.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we always 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.

Overall inspection

Good

Updated 16 May 2023

This service is rated as Good overall.

Following our inspection on 25 April 2023 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 at IntraHealth East Lancs Office as part of our inspection programme, and to provide the service with a rating.

IntraHealth East Lancs Office is a service commissioned by NHS England and provides a School Aged Immunisation Service (SAIS). The service provides children and young people, usually within a school setting, with a vaccination service to boost and immunise against well-known infections such as measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), human papilloma virus (HPV) and influenza (Flu). A rigorous vaccination programme was established where primary and secondary schools were visited in East Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen each school year.

The provider of the service is IntraHealth Ltd who provide a wide range of primary medical service including GPs practices, community pharmacies and telehealth screening.

The registered manager is Laura De Courcy Davies. 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.

Our key findings were:

  • Systems to safeguard children and young people (patients) were well established and effective. There were systems and processes in place to identify vulnerable children, and action was taken to flag potential concerns to ensure the safety of the children.

  • The nursing teams and administrative teams worked in harmony together. Each team demonstrated a clear understanding of their role and responsibilities and how they worked together to provide a safe and effective vaccination service within different school settings.

  • The SAIS nursing teams were proactive in offering education visits to local school children and to faith leaders of different communities to explain the importance of immunisations.

  • The organisational culture was one of promoting learning and development. Incidents, complaints and staff suggestions were all used to inform and promote improvement in the quality of the services provided.

  • Staff feedback forms and staff spoken with during our inspection provided positive feedback, with staff stating the IntraHealth organisation was a supportive and caring organisation to work for. Staff also told us they enjoyed their work and felt very much part of a team.

  • Commissioners of the service provided positive feedback, stating the service was flexible, adaptable and effective.

  • Evidence shared with us demonstrated governance systems were being reviewed and strengthened and quality improvement work was being undertaken.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

  • To actively promote the freedom to speak up arrangements in the organisation.
  • To provide the different staff teams (clinical and non-clinical) with clarity regarding the overall leadership of the services being delivered at the local level.

The provider had already taken steps to make improvements in these areas following the inspection.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Hospitals and Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services