Liverpool Women’s at Aintree is one of two locations providing care as part of Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust. This service is an outpatient only service and is provided from Aintree Centre for Women’s Health, which is located on the site of Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Diagnostic and imaging services are provided by Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and were not inspected as part of this inspection.

Liverpool Women’s at Aintree provides a range of outpatient services for women. These include antenatal and booking clinics, foetal medicine clinics and a full range of gynaecology outpatient services including consultation and treatment. Diagnostic services on this site such as hysteroscopy and colposcopy are provided by the trust; however the imaging services on this site are not provided by Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and did not form part of what we inspected on this occasion.

Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust serves more than 30,000 patients from Liverpool, the surrounding areas and across the UK.

We carried out this inspection as part of our comprehensive inspection programme. We carried out an announced inspection of Liverpool Women’s at Aintree on 19 February 2015. We did not carry out an unannounced inspection of this site as part of our inspection.

Overall we rated Liverpool Women’s at Aintree as Good

Our key findings were as follows:

The service was well managed and well led. Managers had a good knowledge of performance in their areas of responsibility and understood the risks and challenges to the service.

There was a positive culture in the service, staff were proud of the work they did and worked well together as team for the benefit of patients. Staff were caring and compassionate and treated patients with dignity and respect. Patients privacy and confidentiality were maintained.

Patients were treated in a clean and suitably equipped environment. Practice in relation to the prevention and control of infection was good and supported by staff training.

There were good systems in place to safeguard adults and all staff had received adult safeguarding training.

Patients referred to the service were seen in a timely way and all national referral to treatment targets were consistently met. Care and treatment was provided in accordance with evidence based practice and national guidance. There was strong multidisciplinary working and all disciplines worked well together to secure the best outcomes for patients.

Patients case notes were not always available for their appointment. It was not possible to ascertain how widespread this issue was as incidents that related to the availability of patients notes were not reported consistently and the availability of notes was not audited. Staff and managers were not able to tell us the percentage of notes that were not available for appointments.

This was an area of practice where the service needs to make improvements. The service should consider the regular auditing of case notes so that the extent of this issue can be measured and addressed.

Professor Sir Mike Richards

Chief Inspector of Hospitals