English Institute of Sport - Sheffield

Updated 31 July 2023

The English Institute of Sport (EIS) – Sheffield is part of a wider organisation, UK Sports Institute. They provide care and treatment to elite athletes across six registered locations.

EIS Sheffield operates from Coleridge Road, Sheffield, S9 5DA. They provide sport medicine and sport science to athletes who receive funding from UK Sport. The Sports Exercise Medicine (SEM) physicians provide routine consultations for both sports’ injury and illness to athletes from a range of disciplines such as boxing to table tennis.

UK Sports Institute provides centralised governance support, policies and procedures to all locations including EIS Sheffield. The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities of diagnostic and screening procedures.

The service is delivered by three SEM physicians, registered with the General Medical Council (GMC) to provide routine sports medicine consultations for both injury and illness to elite athletes. They are supported by the operations manager and a senior business administrator. EIS occupies space on the ground floor, which is fully accessible and comprises of clinical rooms, physiotherapy and office space. EIS Sheffield is open Monday to Friday 9.00am – 5.00pm. Clinics are available on Tuesday and Wednesdays 9.00am – 1.00pm.

How we inspected this service

Throughout the pandemic CQC has continued to regulate and respond to risk. However, taking into account the circumstances arising as a result of the pandemic and in order to reduce risk, we have conducted our inspections differently.

This inspection was carried out in a way which enabled us to spend a minimum amount of time on site. This was with consent from the provider and in line with all data protection and information governance requirements.

This included:

• Conducting staff interviews using video conferencing
• Conducting in-person staff interviews
• Requesting evidence from the provider
• Conducting a staff questionnaire
• Speaking to athletes
• A short site visit

To get to the heart of athletes’ 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.

Updated 31 July 2023

This service is rated as Good overall. (Previous inspection 17 May 2022 – Requires improvement).

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We carried out an announced focused inspection at English Institute of Sport - Sheffield to follow up on breaches of regulations we found during our previous inspection. We inspected the key questions of safe, effective and well led. The key questions of caring and responsive were rated as good at the last inspection and were not inspected as part of this follow up inspection. Their previous rating of good still stands.

At the previous inspection in May 2022 we found a breach of Regulation 12, safe care and treatment, regarding identifying the learning needs of staff, to cover the scope of their work, such as fire safety and infection prevention and control (IPC) and completing infection prevention and control audits. Regulation 17, good governance, regarding the oversight of training, premises, safety alerts and IPC. The provider was rated as requires improvement overall with ratings of requires improvement in safe, effective and well led. At this inspection we found improvements had been made to effectively comply with Regulation 12 and 17.

The English Institute of Sport – Sheffield is part of a wider organisation, The English Institute of Sport Limited, which provides Sports Medicine and Science disciplines to elite athletes who receive funding from UK Sport Institute. The sports exercise medicines physicians provide routine consultations to do with both sports’ injury and illness to athletes.

This service is registered with the CQC under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 in respect of some, but not all, of the services it provides. There are some general exemptions from regulation by CQC which relate to particular types of service and these are set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. The services provided at this location which are not in scope include: physiotherapy.

The Head of Sports Medicine 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.

Our key findings were:

• The service provided care in a way that kept athletes safe and protected them from avoidable harm. There were processes in place to manage infection prevention and control, and staff had received infection control training.
• Athletes received effective care and treatment that met their needs.There was a system to identify training requirements for staff and leaders who had oversight of training completion. There was evidence of systems and processes for learning, continuous improvement and innovation. For example, clinical audits and learning from incidents were being completed within the service and at a national level.
• The way the service was led and managed promoted the delivery of high-quality, person-centre care. Governance processes had been put in place for service leaders to have oversight of requirements.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Hospitals and Interim Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services