Beechwood Hall

Beechwood Hall is operated by InHealth Limited. Beechwood Hall provides a country wide mobile service. Services are provided in a range of locations including mobile units, stand-alone diagnostic centres or within rented rooms within community or hospital healthcare sites.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection at the providers head office on 4 February 2020, along with unannounced inspections of six different types of diagnostic services between 4 and 14 February 2020, across 21 sites country wide.

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 rate

We rated this service as Outstanding overall as we found many areas of outstanding practice:

• The nature of the service being provided out of small clinics and mobile units meant the service was very flexible. The focus was on providing patients with a service that meant they had choice as to dates, times and locations of services.

• The culture of the organisation was focused on the patient experience and how to provide outstanding care. We saw numerous examples of staff going ‘above and beyond’ which we have detailed within the report.

• Staff working in Magnetic Resonance Imaging had completed a large project in conjunction with a patient network group to use the eight C’s of caring; consider, compassion, comfort, confidence, communication, control, calming and change, to better understand patient anxiety in relation to scans and make changes to practice as a result of these findings.

• Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm screening staff provided services at residential and nursing homes to support patients with difficulties getting to a clinic. This was to support older men, the group of patients most likely to suffer an aneurysm.

• Staff worked with learning disability nurses to promote the importance of breast screening for patients with learning disabilities. This was after a project found that health screening for patients focused on their learning disability rather than other possible co-morbidities.

• The strong culture of improvement and innovation from the managerial team allowed staff to develop their skills and the service to improve.

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

Nigel Acheson Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (London and South)