Archived: Care UK - Wycombe Minor Injuries and Illness Unit

Updated 8 November 2017

Care UK is the UK's largest independent provider of health and social care. They provide out-of-hours (OOHs) primary medical services and a Minor Injuries and Illness Unit (MIIU) across Buckinghamshire. The MIIU provides a range of health services for people who have an injury or illness that is urgent but not life threatening. The out of hours service provides access to GP appointments when GP practise are closed. The service covers a population of approximately 550,000 people across the county of Buckinghamshire and in the last 12 months offered 66,424 out of hours patient contacts and around 43200 contacts within the MIIU. The area covered incorporates two Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) areas, Aylesbury Vale and Chiltern.

Most patients access the out of hour’s service via the NHS 111 telephone service. Patients may be seen by a clinician, receive a telephone consultation or a home visit, depending on their needs. Occasionally patients access services as a walk-in patient or via ‘direct booking pilot’ project (Three local practices are able to fax patient details directly to Care UK-Bucks between 6pm and 6.30pm if they are not able to offer the appointment). Patients access the minor injuries and illness unit directly without any previous assessment of need.

The administrative base for Care UK-Bucks is located in Aylesbury. We visited the Care UK-Bucks call centre and headquarters to review policies and procedures relevant to the service and meet with the service managers. The full address for call centre and headquarters is:

• Care UK-Bucks, Unit 3, Midshires Business Park, Smeaton Close, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, HP19 8HL. We visited this call centre and headquarters.

Out-of-hours (OOHs) services are provided from five primary care centres across the county on every day of the year. We inspected the out of hours service at Wycombe General Hospital and the MIIU and did not visit any of the other four OOH bases.

The Wycombe General Hospital out of hours service is open from 6.30pm to 8am (overnight) Monday to Saturday and from 8am on a Saturday through to 8am Monday morning. This centre also opens on bank holidays from 8am to 8am the next day.

• The MIIU is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Wycombe OOH Primary Care Centre and MIIU are situated in part of the main hospital which is rented from the Buckinghamshire Health Care NHS Trust.

Updated 8 November 2017

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Care UK – Wycombe Minor Injuries and Illness Unit on 13 December 2016. The overall rating for the service was requires improvement. Specifically the service was rated good for provision of effective, caring and responsive services and requires improvement for provision of safe and well-led services. The full comprehensive report on the December 2016 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Care UK – Wycombe Minor Injuries and Illness Unit on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

This inspection was an announced focused inspection carried out on 26 September 2017 to confirm that the service had carried out their plan to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breaches in regulations that we identified in our previous inspection on 13 December 2016. This report covers our findings in relation to those requirements and also additional improvements made since our last inspection.Overall the service is now rated as good overall with provision of both safe and well-led services re-rated to good.

Our key findings were as follows:

• Reception staff had been trained to undertake initial assessment of priority for walk in patients and followed an assessment protocol. Clinical staff were available to support the assessment process when needed. The provider was in the process of recruiting clinical navigators to support initial assessment and the recording of baseline clinical measurements for walk in patients.
• Information about how to make a complaint was carried in the vehicles used to carry staff to home visits.
• Prescribing of high risk medicines followed the providers prescribing policy and there were checks in place to ensure this happened.
• Performance in relation to national quality requirements was improving.
• Blank prescriptions were held safely and there was a system to track them through to issuing.
• A system was in place to monitor the training and appraisals of sub-contracted staff. The system also gave the provider assurance that staff maintained their professional registrations and updated their Disclosure and Barring service (DBS) checks. (DBS checks identify whether a person has a criminal record or is on an official list of people barred from working in roles where they may have contact with children or adults who may be vulnerable).

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice