KIMS Hospital

Updated 14 March 2023

KIMS Hospital is operated by KIMS Hospital Ltd. The hospital opened in 2014. It is a private hospital in Maidstone, Kent. The hospital primarily serves the communities of Kent. It also accepts patient referrals from outside this area.

The hospital has 99 beds, 68 of which were in use at the time of the inspection, five purpose-built theatres, an endoscopy suite, an interventional suite and outpatient and diagnostic facilities.

The registered manager has been in post since 2016 and is also the controlled drugs accountable officer. The hospital had been inspected previously in January 2018 and September 2019 when it was rated good overall and good for the core service of surgery.

Updated 14 March 2023

Updated 6 April 2018

Medical care services were a small proportion of hospital activity. The main service was surgery. Where arrangements were the same, we have reported findings in the surgery section.

We rated this service as good because it was safe, effective, responsive to people’s needs, caring and well-led.

Updated 20 April 2016

This report relates to an entirely outpatient based service and the ratings and narrative reflect this.

We rated services for children and young people as Good overall. We rated services as good for being safe, responsive, caring and well led. We rated effective the domain as requiring improvement.

Children were seen in a bright, clean, purpose built, child friendly environment which had modern equipment and age appropriate facilities. Children were chaperoned throughout the outpatient department by appropriately trained children’s nurses. All nurses within the hospital had received level two safeguarding training and those in direct contact with children had completed level three training. Care was being provided by competent, well trained staff in all areas inspected.

The parents we talked to spoke very highly of the service and care their children had received at KIMS hospital. There was good access and flow to children’s services and increasing numbers of children were being seen. The hospital had employed a second children’s trained nurse to cope with the increase in demand.

The leadership of the hospital was cohesive, transparent and visible to all staff members. The service had an open culture where incident reporting was actively encouraged and used for training to improve care. Staff and public engagement were sought via satisfaction surveys for staff, parents and children. However the leadership of the children's service lacked some key roles. There was a lack of senior oversight of the service from a paediatric or children's nursing perspective and whilst this did not impact significantly on the outpatient service offered, it did leave the service operating outside of national guidance for the care of children in the independent sector and safeguarding children.

Updated 20 April 2016

It is important to point out that this section of the report relates to staff input rather than patient outcomes. There were no patients in the unit at the time of the inspection, so it is not possible to give a rating based on the care patients received. The inspection report is a narrative rather than a judgement against the ratings.

Overall we found that there were significant concerns identified by the inspection team. The concerns identified included staffing levels, the results of local audits and the potential for the reduction of nurse competencies due to lack of practice.

The CCU was empty during our inspection. Nursing staff were engaged with writing new policies and protocols in preparation for a future increase in patients and therefore failed to routinely practice critical competencies and skills. This lack of practice put staff at risk of losing critical competencies and skills. Although there was a programme in place to mitigate such losses – including the opportunity for staff to work supernumerary shifts in CCUs at other hospitals – we found that its processes were not structured or consistent enough for staff to be sure that their skills were maintained.

The CCU environment was clean, hygienic and well equipped. New equipment was in place and staff had been trained in its use. The lead nurse maintained documentary evidence that staff were adequately trained and assessed in the use of equipment.

A change in nursing staff rotas meant that the CCU could not accept emergency or unplanned admissions. A non-contractual system of flexible working was in place among the nursing staff that meant they were often under pressure to work excessively long hours. Consultant intensivists were available on a 24-hour rota, which sometimes breached Intensive Care Society (ICS) requirements as staff would also be on call for another hospital at the same time. Staff told us that the provision of adequate staffing levels was one of their main concerns about the service and the unit could not safely be opened for non-elective patients until more nurses were recruited.

An incident reporting procedure was in place and most incidents relating to the CCU occurred due to low staffing levels. Incident reports monitored by senior management contained inconsistent evidence that learning from incidents had taken place.

Experienced staff were in the process of establishing policies and protocols using national benchmarks and standards, including clinical guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the British Association of Critical Care Nurses (BACCN).

The CCU was not contributing to national audits compiled by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) as the department was operating at a low capacity. Staff had begun to conduct small internal audits as preparation for future national versions.

Staff were passionate about building the capacity of the service and planning for its future success as a centre of excellence. The acting lead nurse for the department had undertaken work to ensure the team was robust, stable and coherent and a recruitment plan had been implemented to increase staffing levels and so accommodate greater capacity. The department was short of three full time nurses to meet the number considered safe for it to operate at full capacity.

Updated 6 April 2018

We have included children and young people’s services within outpatients and diagnostic imaging as they represented only 3% of this activity and were not seen elsewhere in the hospital.

The main service was surgery. Where arrangements were the same, we have reported findings in the surgery section.

We rated this service as good because it was safe, responsive to people’s needs, caring and well-led.

Updated 29 October 2019

The service had enough staff to care for patients and keep them safe. Staff had training in key skills, understood how to protect patients from abuse, and managed safety well. The service controlled infection risk well. Staff assessed risks to patients, acted on them and kept good care records. They managed medicines well.Staff collected safety information and used it to improve the service.

The senior leadership team had ensured structured root cause analyses had been undertaken of the serious incidents and maintained oversight of the actions resulting from these. They ensured changes were made quickly and staff were provided with opportunities for reflection and provided support and additional training if required.