Optical Express – London (Shaftesbury Avenue) Clinic is operated by Optical Express Limited. Facilities at the location include one laser treatment room, one surgeon’s examination room, one discharge room and one screening room.

The service provides laser correction procedures using class 4 and class 3b lasers carried out by ophthalmologists.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection on 11 December 2017, along with an unannounced visit to the clinic on 19 December 2017.

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.

We regulate refractive eye surgery but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them when they are provided as a single specialty service. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• The consent policy did not reflect Royal College of Ophthalmologists 2017 for  a seven day cooling off period between the initial consent meeting with the surgeon and the final consent by the surgeon.
• There was inconsistent management of the environment, which resulted in clinical areas not always being clean and free from dirt and dust.
• There was evidence of a lack of consistency in local leadership, which was also reflected in feedback from staff.

However, we found the following areas of good practice:

• Patients were involved in their care and had the opportunity to ask questions at all stages of their treatment.
• Staff treated people with kindness, care, respect and dignity.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it must take some actions to comply with the regulations and that it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with three requirement notices that affected refractive eye surgery services. Details are at the end of the report.

Amanda Stanford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (South East)