NHS watchdog says Virgin Care-run clinic put individuals at risk

The Care High quality Commission has criticised Virgin Care’s solutions at Croydon hospital. Photograph: Frances Roberts /Alamy

The NHS watchdog has accused a privately run urgent care centre of putting patients’ well being at risk by making use of receptionists with minimal healthcare training to assess how unwell arrivals were.

A Care Quality Commission (CQC) report has criticised the operation of the urgent care centre at Croydon hospital in south London, which is run by Virgin Care. CQC inspectors located the centre was in breach of 4 standard standards of care and have advised Virgin Care to outline by next week the remedial action it is taking.

The CQC’s report, primarily based on inspections of the centre final July and September, concluded that “care and remedy was not planned and delivered in a way that was intended to ensure people’s safety and welfare”.

Inspectors who initial visited final July were anxious to locate that receptionists had been “streaming” all arrivals – deciding who needed to go into Croydon hospital’s A&ampE unit up coming door and who could be taken care of in the centre – regardless of their lack of proper health care knowledge or education to form this kind of essential judgments.

It was uneasy that “patients have been streamed for remedy by non-clinical reception employees. We were concerned that there was a risk of a patient with a serious illness or damage getting wrongly streamed and their condition deteriorating. We have been concerned that the streaming policy as carried out at the CUCC could potentially place men and women at danger”.

Some medical doctors have been uneasy about receptionists undertaking streaming. 1 stated: “It is a genuinely important choice where someone goes and I will not know how you can make that decision if you are not a clinician.” Even though most sufferers have been accurately streamed, some had been sent to the wrong area, doctors explained.

New reception staff received only a few hrs of education prior to beginning to assess sufferers with a broad range of symptoms, did not cover streaming as portion of their induction and underwent no competency checks afterwards, the CQC discovered.

“We have been concerned that the instruction was not sufficiently robust or satisfactory for new members of personnel who had no expertise or prior information of health-related signs,” the report explained.

Although the centre was meant to assess 95% of patients inside of twenty minutes, most sufferers had to wait above an hour to see a medical professional and “at busier occasions the wait could be double this”.

Labour mentioned the “enormous failings in a privately run support” found by the CQC should make its chair, former Conservative MP David Prior, rethink his belief that more privatisation would benefit the NHS.

“The report highlights a worrying situation the place patients risk poor care at the hands of cost-cutting private businesses. Ministers should make positive that personal sector organizations working for the NHS are forced to meet the same higher specifications of quality and security,” explained Andrew Gwynne, the shadow well being minister.

Virgin Care has created improvements and says it now sees 70% of individuals within the 20-minute target.

Croydon clinical commissioning group, which oversees the firm’s £2.2m three-year contract to run the centre, stated the CQC’s worries had been addressed and that ” reception staff are nicely qualified and constantly have been” and there was “clinical assessment of individuals” on best of that.

Virgin Care declined to respond to the CQC’s principal findings, but stated that sufferers have been not currently being put at risk. “We have cared for a lot more than a hundred,000 sufferers employing the assessment technique specified by our commissioner and, as the CQC’s report really obviously states: ‘there have been no severe incidents given that the streaming policy [was] introduced’,” said a spokesman for the firm, which is 1 of the greatest providers of NHS companies.

A Department of Health spokesperson explained: “All NHS solutions need to be commissioned by medical professionals in the ideal interests of their patients, and there is no excuse for companies falling short, no matter who supplies them. This government has created the CQC independent for the initial time, and inspectors have rightly highlighted where Croydon Urgent Care Centre needs to improve – evidence that our new rigorous inspection regime is working, and individuals will anticipate the findings to be acted on.”

NHS watchdog says Virgin Care-run clinic put individuals at risk