Blakenall Village Centre

Updated 31 July 2019

Humanitas Healthcare Services (HHS) Ltd is an organisation registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC)to provide services at Blakenall Village Centre, 79 Thames Road, Blakenall, Walsall, WS3 1LZ.

Humanitas Healthcare Services Ltd provides a vasectomy, carpel tunnel decompression service, trigger finger release, soft tissue and joint injection, excision of clinically benign lumps and nail surgery for NHS and private patients.

The service is commission by NHS Walsall Clinical Commissioning Group through an Any Qualified Provider contract for Walsall CCG’s Minor Surgery Service.

The staff team is led by an experienced Medical Director Dr Albert Benjamin, supported by an experienced nurse with additional training in minor surgery. Clinics are held between 10am and 4pm on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The service can be contacted by telephone or email. Appointments for NHS patients are made through their GP and the choose and book e-referral service. Private patients can contact the service directly to make an appointment.

The service is located on the first floor of a building owned and managed by a community enterprise organisation and leased to NHS Property Services. Access to the first floor is via lifts or the stairs.

How we inspected this service:

Before visiting we reviewed a range of information we held about the service and asked the service to send us a range of information. During the visit we spoke with the Medical Director and the Nursing Director. We gained feedback from nine completed CQC comment cards. We carried out observations, reviewed the systems in place for the running of the service, to include how clinical decisions were made, sampled key policies and procedures and looked at a selection of anonymised patient records.

Further details about the service can be found on the provider website: www.humanitas-healthcare.co.uk

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 31 July 2019

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Blakenall Village Centre, Walsall under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the service was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

At our last inspection in May 2018, we found that the service was not providing safe or well led care because:

• Risk assessments in relation to safety issues in the areas of the building used by the service, and the range of emergency medicines available to staff had not been completed.
• The process used to check the expiry dates of single use items was not effective.
• The programme of quality improvement activity and review of the effectiveness and appropriateness of the care provided needed to be further developed.
• A formalised system for undertaking recruitment checks on staff who worked on an adhoc basis was not in place and relevant recruitment information had not been obtained.

We asked the provider to make improvements regarding the above issues. We checked these areas as part of this comprehensive inspection and found they had been resolved.

The Medical Director 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.

We received nine completed comment cards at the time of the inspection. All of the responses were positive about their experience at the service. Feedback on the care and treatment provided described the care received as being excellent, staff were helpful, friendly and caring, and all information was fully explained.

Our key findings were:

• People had access to and received detailed and clear information about the proposed treatment to enable them to make an informed decision. People were offered appointments at a time convenient to them.
• Staff had access to information they needed to assess and treat patients in a timely and accessible way. There was evidence to support that the service operated a safe, effective and timely referral process.
• The way in which care was delivered was reviewed to ensure it was delivered according to best practice guidance and staff were well supported to update their knowledge through training.
• There were effective procedures in place for monitoring and managing risk to people and staff safety.
• The service had clearly defined processes and systems in place to keep people safe and safeguarded from abuse.
• There were clear responsibilities, roles and systems for accountability to support good governance and management.
• The service had introduced a range of audits, including return rate for samples post vasectomy and histology results, as well as infection rates. The provider continued to share their results on an annual basis with the Association of Surgeons in Primary Care (ASPC).
• The service supported overseas projects. They had participated in World Vasectomy Day, working with an organisation to start contraception education. The service supported the British Society for Hand Surgery (BSHH) programme for hand surgery. This programme ensures local consultant support and education for doctors carrying out hand surgery outside of hospitals.
• The integration of the patient record system with the NHS electronic system had enabled information to be shared more efficiently between the provider and NHS GPs.
• The provider was embracing technology and had investigated in a telephony system to divert calls to the office onto the nursing director’s mobile telephone. Patient satisfaction surveys could be completed electronically via the service website, the information collated and displayed as pie charts.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGPChief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care