HeartScan Ltd provides cardiac diagnostic and screening services for adults and young people over 14 years old. The service is limited to providing non-invasive diagnostics including electrocardiography, echocardiography and exercise testing.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology and carried out a short notice announced inspection on 10 January 2019.

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.

Services we rate

We rated it as Outstanding overall.

We found areas of outstanding practice relation to:

• All staff were actively engaged in activities to monitor and improve quality and outcomes. The continuing development of staff skills, competence and knowledge was recognised as being integral to ensuring high quality care.

• Staff were committed to working collaboratively, there was a holistic approach to planning people’s care and discharge, or referral to other services. Arrangements fully reflected individual circumstances and preferences. People who used services were active partners in their care.

• There was a strong, visible person-centred culture. Staff were highly motivated and inspired to offer care that was kind and promoted people’s dignity. Relationships between patients and staff were strong, caring and supportive. These relationships were highly valued by staff and promoted by the leader of the service

• Services were tailored to meet the needs of individual people and were delivered in a way to ensure flexibility, choice and continuity of care. People could access services in a way and at a time that suited them.

• The leader of the service inspired and motivated staff to succeed and for HeartScan to deliver exceptional patient care. They drove continuous improvement and there was a proactive approach to seeking out and embedding new and more advanced models of care.

• The service contributed to research within its networks and specialist field and shared their learning and expertise widely.

• The service had a vision ‘to be recognised and acknowledged as the leading diagnostic clinic for cardiac interventions in the North of England’ and had plans to turn it into action. The delivery plan had a strong focus on collaboration with current and potential service users.

• Staff were proud of the work they did and of the quality of service they provided. There was consistent constructive engagement and staff held the value that if anyone had a concern then it should be raised.

• The service had good systems for governance and performance management and to identify risks, plans to eliminate or reduce them, and cope with both the expected and unexpected.

• Analysis of information was used proactively to identify opportunities to drive enhancements in care and the service was committed to making improvements by learning from feedback and when things went well or went wrong. The service promoted staff training, learning from research and innovation.

However,

• There was no health promotion information available in the Osborne Clinic.

• There was little in the environment that was appealing to children and young people.

  There was no definitive process in place for meeting the needs of patients who cannot speak English.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make some improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve.

Ellen Armistead

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (North Region)