Malling Health Primary Care Service Sandwell

Updated 12 January 2023

Malling Health Primary Care Service Sandwell is provided from the urgent treatment centre in Sandwell General hospital which is based in the Sandwell area of the West Midlands.

The provider organisation is Malling Health (UK) Limited. The service provides urgent care and streaming services (redirecting patients to appropriate care). The service is designed to see and treat patients who do not require emergency care and reduce the pressure on the emergency department.

The service is commissioned by Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS trust.

The service offers non-emergency care for walk-in patients with minor illnesses that need urgent attention. These services are available to patients seven days a week between 9am and 9pm. At the time of the inspection the service opening hours had been temporarily extended from 7am to 10pm to help meet increased demand.

The provider has a satellite service at Birmingham City Hospital, we did not visit this site as part of the inspection. At Birmingham City hospital, the service provides urgent care to those patients who have been assessed and triaged by hospital staff.

Patients are referred for urgent treatment by the streaming nurse, who is based in the accident and emergency department at Sandwell General Hospital or patients can also be referred to the Urgent Care Centre by the NHS 111 service. NHS 111 is a telephone-based service where callers are assessed, given advice and directed to a local service that most appropriately meets their needs.

The service has approximately 27 staff directly employed by the organisation including a Services Manager. The clinical staff working at the service include GP’s, advanced nurse practitioners (ANP), and healthcare assistants (HCA). These were either employed by the service directly or as bank staff (those who are retained on a list by the provider) or through an agency.

The area management team consists of a Director of Operations and a Clinical Chair.

CQC registered the provider to carry out the following regulated activities at the service:

• Treatment of disease, disorder or injury

• Diagnostic and screening procedures

The service’s website address is www.malling.health/

Updated 12 January 2023

This service is rated as Good overall.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Requires improvement

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Malling Health Primary Care Service Sandwell on 29 November 2022. This was part of our inspection programme and to provide a rating for the service.

At this inspection we found:

• The service had clear systems to manage risk so that safety incidents were less likely to happen. When incidents did happen, the service learned from them and improved their processes.
• The provider had implemented processes to keep patients and staff safe and had processes to escalate safeguarding concerns.
• The provider routinely reviewed the effectiveness and appropriateness of the care it provided. The provider was aware that the service was not meeting the targets specified by its commissioners and they were acting to improve the quality of services.
• Staff treated patients with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.
• Clinical rooms and waiting area space was limited and patients were not always able to access care in a timely manner. However, the provider had implemented processes to mitigate risk and prioritise patients and we found the provider was taking appropriate action to improve access including liaising with the NHS trust to improve facilities.
• The service sought patient feedback, learnt from complaints and made improvements to safety and quality.
• Leaders understood the challenges to improving high quality care and were working with the hospital trust to make necessary improvements to the service.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• To continue to work with the hospital trust to identify solutions that will enable them to effectively meet the increases in demand and offer more timely access.
• To Improve oversight of staff training to ensure staff remain up to date with their required training.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Hospitals and Interim Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services