Greater Lancashire Hospital

Updated 25 April 2017

• Greater Lancashire Hospital is operated by Bespoke Healthcare Holdings Ltd who acquired it as Sandon House Clinic in January 2014. The clinic has recently changed its name to Greater Lancashire Hospital. It is a private hospital in Preston, Lancashire.

• The hospital primarily serves the communities of the Lancashire and Cumbria areas but also accepts patient referrals from outside these areas.

• The hospital also offers cosmetic procedures such as dermal fillers and laser hair removal, ophthalmic treatments and cosmetic dentistry. We did not inspect these services.

• This was our first inspection of this hospital. We carried out the announced part of the inspection on 15 and 16 September 2016, and an unannounced visit to the hospital on 23 September 2016.

Updated 25 April 2017

Greater Lancashire Hospital is operated by Bespoke Healthcare Holdings Ltd who acquired it as Sandon House Clinic in January 2014. The clinic has recently changed its name to Greater Lancashire Hospital. Sandon House Clinic remains but for the cosmetic surgery side of the business only.

We inspected the main core service of surgery using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection on 15 and 16 September 2016 and an unannounced visit to the hospital on 23 September 2016 as part of our national programme to inspect and rate all independent hospitals.

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.

Whilst outpatient and diagnostic imaging services were provided, outpatient activity was provided by another independent provider and diagnostic imaging was only undertaken as part of a particular surgical procedure (guided spinal injections using a single C-arm X-ray machine). We have therefore not inspected outpatient activity and, where we have inspected diagnostic imaging, this is included in findings about surgery.

We rated Greater Lancashire Hospital as good overall. We have judged the service as ‘outstanding’ for caring. We also rated the hospital as ‘good’ for safe, responsive and well-led care.

Updated 25 April 2017

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

Patients received compassionate care and were treated with dignity and respect, describing care as friendly and helpful. There was a culture of reporting and learning from incidents. Areas were cleaned and equipment was checked regularly. Care was based on national guidelines and local policy. Pain was managed and food and refreshments were available. Staff competencies were monitored and there were strategies in place to manage risk and maintain sustainability.