St Ives House Also known as East Lancashire Medical Services

Updated 11 October 2017

East Lancashire Medical Services (ELMS) is a Social Enterprise organisation delivering Urgent Primary Care Services 365 days a year. The head office is at St Ives House and at the time of the inspection there were five satellite centres from which services were provided :

• St Ives House. St Ives Business Park. Accrington Road. Blackburn. BB1 2EG

• Burnley Urgent Care Centre, Casterton Avenue, Burnley. BB10 2PQ

• Clitheroe Community Hospital. Chatburn Road, Clitheroe. BB7 4JX

• Pendle Community Hospital. Leeds Road, Nelson. BB9 9TG

• Rossendale Primary Health Centre. Bacup Road, Rossendale. BB4 7PL.

For the purposes of the March 2017 inspection we visited the head office and the services based at St Ives House and at Burnley Urgent Care Centre. The service is contracted to provide OOH primary medical services to registered patients and those requiring immediately necessary treatment when GP practices are closed which includes overnight, during weekends, bank holidays and when GP practices are closed for training. Patients may be seen by a clinician, receive a telephone consultation or a home visit, depending on their needs.

Updated 11 October 2017

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at St Ives House (East Lancashire Medical Services Limited) on 6 March 2017. The overall rating for the practice was good, although the key question of safe was rated as requires improvement. A requirement notice was issued in relation to safe care and treatment, as the provider was found to be in breach of regulation 12 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. The full comprehensive report on the March 2017 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for St Ives House on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

This inspection was a desk-based review carried out on 6 September 2017 to confirm that the service had carried out their plan to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breach in regulations that we identified in our previous inspection on 6 March 2017. This report covers our findings in relation to those requirements and also additional improvements made since our last inspection.

Overall the service is rated as good, with the previous rating of requires improvement for the key question of safe updated to a rating of good.

Our key findings were as follows:

• The service had made improvements to how it documented mandatory training undertaken by sessional staff.

• All staff had been reminded who could undertake chaperone responsibilities, and the service’s chaperone policy had been updated to make this more explicit.

• Staff who drove as part of their role had been reminded that relevant health checks were available to them as part of their employment with the service.

• The service’s incident reporting policy had been updated to ensure it incorporated incidents being investigated following complaints.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice