The Surrey Park Clinic

The Surrey Park Clinic is operated by The Surrey Park Clinic (IHG) Ltd. Facilities include one treatment room for minor outpatient surgical procedures , a pre and post surgical rest room, three consulting rooms and a pharmacy for outpatient dispensing.

The service provides outpatient services including minor outpatient surgical procedures and ultrasound scans, mostly for adults but including 40 children and young people aged 13 - 18 (July 2015 – June 2016). We inspected outpatient services and include services for children and young people within this core service report because of the very low number of children and young people attending as patients.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the inspection on 17 October 2016. We rated the service overall as requires improvement. However, caring was good, and leadership was inadequate because of the lack of formal governance structures and clinical oversight.

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.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

The main service provided by this service was outpatients. We rated this service as requires improvement overall.

We found areas of practice that require improvement:

• Senior staff who investigated incidents and complaints had not been trained in root cause analysis which meant that investigations were not always sufficiently robust.
• Measures taken to prevent incidents recurring were not always successful, indicating that the reason for the incident occurring had not been adequately understood.
• Staff did not understand their responsibilities under the duty of candour and we saw examples where the service had failed to discharge their responsibilities under this duty.
• There were limited audits within the service to assure managers that staff were following the correct pathways and policies which kept patients safe, for example there were no regular hand hygiene audits.
• Although patient records were mostly stored securely, complete contemporaneous records were not available as consultant notes were not stored on site.
• Staff did not all have the required level of safeguarding training for both adults and children and young people.
• The service had levels of bank staffing which were consistently worse than the average rate for other independent services.
• The clinic’s policies and procedures were nearly all outside of their review date, which meant that staff might not have worked to the relevant and current evidence-based guidance, standards, best practice and legislation.

We found areas of practice that were inadequate:

• The service did not have a formal clinical governance committee or medical advisory committee to review clinical practice and address clinical issues, and there was no clinical risk register to log and monitor risks.
• The clinic owner and general manager, who were both non-clinical staff, took responsibility for the granting and reviewing of practicing privileges. The absence of a consultant or doctor to advise on these processes meant it might have been difficult for the senior management team to assess the competencies and suitability of doctors applying for practicing privileges.
• There had been repeated incidents where a patient had been informed of another patient’s test results which was a breach of the Data Protection Act and indicated that the service had failed to understand why this had happened.
• The service did not have access to interpreters and used family members instead. This meant the clinic might not have had assurance all patients who did not speak English understood, or felt involved in, all aspects of their care. Staff, including members of the senior management team, did not appear to understand that using family members to interpret was not best practice.
• There was no registered manager at the time of the inspection and the service had failed to take any action to remedy this. However, the general manager responded promptly immediately after the inspection and submitted an application.

We found areas of good practice in relation to outpatient care:

• Equipment was correctly labelled with details of service dates and we saw evidence of daily checklists for the resuscitation trolley.
• We saw documentation of patient allergies and evidence of antibiotic cover in the patient records we examined.
• The service had an on-call rota to enable them to see patients out of hours should they have any complications following labiaplasty.
• There were multi-disciplinary team meetings each month demonstrating a coordinated approach to patient care.
• Patient feedback on the service received at the clinic was consistently positive, with many commenting on the degree to which staff gave them privacy and time to make decisions.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it must take some actions to comply with the regulations and that it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with three requirement notices that affected outpatients. Details are at the end of the report.

Professor Edward Baker

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals