South Manchester Private Clinic

Updated 24 October 2019

South Manchester Private Clinic is operated by National Unplanned Pregnancy Advisory Service (NUPAS) in Stockport. South Manchester Private Clinic (SMPC) began operating as a termination of pregnancy service in 1978 and has been operational for over 40 years.

The clinic provides termination of pregnancy services for women from Manchester and surrounding areas. It also accepts patients from outside this area, including Ireland.

The National Unplanned Pregnancy Advisory Service (NUPAS SMPC) is commissioned by the NHS to provide free abortion counselling, treatments, pregnancy testing, sexually transmitted infection screening (STI) and contraception. The service also treats privately funded patients who are out of their contractual area.

The treatment options offered by the centre are:

The service provides surgical termination of pregnancy up to 20 weeks gestation, early medical abortion, up to nine weeks and six days gestation and medical termination of pregnancy. Surgical termination is carried out under general anaesthetic, by vacuum aspiration, dilation and evacuation or with no anaesthesia up to 10 weeks according to the patient’s choice and needs.

Contraception to patients who undertake a termination of pregnancy

Sexually transmitted infection screening for patients aged 25 and under.

The service does not currently offer home abortions and does not carry out abortions after 20 weeks gestation. The service ceased to offer vasectomies in January 2019.

All patients are treated as day cases with no overnight beds. If a patient required an overnight stay for any reason, they would be transferred to the local NHS hospital with which the service has a service level agreement.

The service is registered with the Care Quality Commission to carry out the following regulated activities:

Diagnostic and screening procedures

Family planning

Surgical procedures

Termination of pregnancies

Transport services, triage and medical advice provided remotely

Treatment of disease, disorder or injury

At the time of the inspection, a new manager had been in post for nine months and was registered with the CQC in July 2019. The former registered manager continued to work for the organisation in a different role.

Following the inspection in February 2016 there were two compliance actions/requirement notices associated with this service. We reviewed these during this inspection and these have now been met.

Updated 24 October 2019

South Manchester Private Clinic is operated by National Unplanned Pregnancy Advisory Service (NUPAS) in Stockport. The clinic provides termination of pregnancy (abortion) services for women from Manchester and surrounding areas. It also accepts patients from outside this area, including Ireland.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out an unannounced inspection on 13 August 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.

The main service provided by this clinic was termination of pregnancy services.

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.

Ann Ford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (North West)

Updated 24 October 2019

We rated this service as good because it was safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.