Spire Clare Park Hospital is operated by Spire Healthcare Limited. The hospital provides surgery, medical care, out patients and diagnostic imaging services for adults, children and young people. Following national guidance, inpatient surgical services and outpatient physiotherapy services were only offered to children age three and above.
We carried out the inspection on 30 May 2018.This was a focussed (follow up) inspection to assess whether the service had made required improvements to the children and young people’s service, following our previous inspection of the service in August 2016.
We gave the hospital seven days’ notice of the inspection, to ensure staff representatives from the children and young people’s service were available on the day of inspection.
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.
Services we rate
We rated children and young people’s services as good. This was an improvement from the previous rating of requires improvement.
There were systems and processes in place and followed by staff to keep children and young people safe and safeguarded from abuse. There were sufficient numbers of staff with relevant skills and experience and up to date mandatory training in safety systems, processes and practices to deliver safe care to children and young people. Risks to children and young people were assessed and staff acted to reduce identified risks. There was a good track record on safety and staff under stood their responsibilities to raise concerns and incidents.
Children and young people’s care and treatment was delivered in line with current evidence based guidance and standards. The service monitored the effectiveness of care and treatment and used the findings to benchmark against other similar services and improve services. Consent to care and treatment was obtained in line with national guidance
Staff cared for children, young people and their families with compassion. Feedback from patients and their parents was positive about the way staff treated them. The emotional needs of children, young people and their parents were fully considered. There was effective use of distraction activities to reduce anxieties in children and young people. Staff involved children, young people and their parents in decisions about their care and treatment.
The service was planned around meeting the needs of the local population, with appointments and admissions offered to meet the individual circumstances of each patient.
There was clear leadership of the children and young people’s service. A lead nurse had responsibility and accountability for all the children and young people’s services in the hospital. There was identified medical leadership. Governance and risk management processes supported improvements to the service. There was an inclusive culture, with staff of all professions across the hospital working together to deliver quality care to children and young people. There were processes for children, young people and their parents to feedback about their experience of care and treatment at the hospital. Staff acted on this feedback to make improvements to the service.
However, we found that although the quality of inpatient and some outpatient records were monitored, there was no process to audit the quality and content of outpatient records held solely by consultants and not shared with the hospital.
Staff took account of the distress carrying out observations may have on children. However, when they did not carry out formal observations to reduce children’s distress, they did not always record this reason. Staff did not record the informal visual observations that they carried out to determine the child’s condition was stable and the child was not at risk of deterioration.
Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve.
We rated children and young people’s services as good. This was an improvement from the previous rating of requires improvement.