Archived: Victoria Also known as London Travel Clinic

Updated 7 October 2019

Victoria provides travel health services including vaccinations, medicines and advice on travel related issues to both adults and children. The clinic is based at Level 19, Portland House,

Bressenden Place, SW1E 5RS. The location has four linked sites Vauxhall (Vintage House, 37 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7TL), Chelsea (The Courtyard, 250 Kings Rd, London, SW3 5UE), Finchley (311Dental care, 311 Ballards Lane, North Finchley, London N12 8LY), Orpington (Enso House, 3 New Mill Road, Orpington BR5 3TW).

The service sees between 200 and 500 patients a year at the sites associated with Victoria. The service is a designated yellow fever vaccination centre. Services are available to any fee-paying patient. The service had corporate account clients for businesses to access travel health services for their employees.

The service is in an accessible purpose-built building.

Patients are directed to the fifteenth floor of the building which is accessible via lift or stairs, to the provider’s reception and waiting area. The areas used by the service include consultation rooms, administrative space and accessible patient and staff facilities.

Services are available by appointment only. Appointment times vary fortnightly.

Appointments are either available from Tuesday and Thursday 1-5pm. Or Monday, Wednesday 8.30am-8pm and Thursday twice monthly 12.30pm-8pm Friday 9am -5pm, Saturdays 10am-3pm

The London Travel Clinic is part of Vaccination UK. At a local level the service is run by a travel nurse specialist, who is the nurse manager and operations manager, a reception and administration manager and four nurses. Those staff who are required to register with a professional body were registered with a licence to practice.

The service is registered with the CQC to provide the regulated activities of diagnostic and screening procedures and treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

Before visiting, we reviewed a range of information we hold about the service and asked other organisations to share what they knew. During our visit we:

• Spoke with clinical and non-clinical staff including the clinical lead, the operations manager, a nurse and an administrative staff member.

• Reviewed an anonymised sample of the personal care or treatment records of patients.

• Reviewed service policies, procedures and other relevant documentation.

• Inspected the premises and equipment used by the service.

• Reviewed CQC comment cards completed by service users.

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.

Updated 7 October 2019

This service is rated as Good overall.

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 Victoria as part of our inspection programme. Victoria is part of The London Travel Clinic which provides travel immunisations, treatment and advice to fee paying patients.

We had previously inspected this service as part of our unrated programme of independent health inspections. At our last inspection undertaken on 20 August 2018 we found that the service was in breach of regulation 12 (safe care and treatment) and regulation 17 (good governance) of The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. At that inspection we found that the provider had not adequately mitigated risks associated with infection control and fire safety and the service had not assessed the need for all emergency medicines. In addition we found that there was no ongoing quality improvement activity programme, there was no mechanism in place to review and act on patient feedback and the business continuity plan, medicines policy and policies related to information governance were not specific to the site.

At this inspection we found that these concerns had been resolved.

The clinical nurse lead for the service 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.

One patient provided feedback to CQC about the service. The patient said that the treatment provided was quick and efficient and that their needs were met.

Our key findings were:

• The provider had systems in place in relation to safeguarding.
• Risks were adequately assessed, addressed or mitigated.
• Appropriate emergency equipment was available on site and staff knew what to do if a patient presented with symptoms of sepsis.
• There were systems in place to report and discuss significant events.
• Medicines were appropriately managed and there were systems in place to respond to safety alerts.
• Care and treatment provided was effective and met patient needs.
• There were systems to review consultations, feedback to staff and implement improvements where needed.
• Feedback from patients was positive about access to treatment and the care provided and there was a system for managing complaints.
• Services were designed to respond to the needs of patients.
• Leadership was visible and staff said that they felt happy to raise concerns or issues that arose.
• Governance systems were present in most areas although there were some instances where the provider did not have effective systems in place to oversee risk.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Consider ways to better accommodate patients with accessibility needs.
• Include details of all staff working at the site in the business continuity plan.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care