St Hugh's Hospital

Ratings - Outpatients

• Overall

  Good

• Safe

  Good

• Effective

  Good

• Caring

  Good

• Responsive

  Good

• Well-led

  Good

Our view of the service

Part of the Healthcare Management Trust (HMT), St Hugh's is a non-profit organisation using surpluses to further their charitable mission to provide market leading care solutions to those with complex needs within marginalised and deprived community settings.

As well as private healthcare services, HMT St Hugh's works in collaboration with the NHS to ensure all communities have access to quality healthcare services.

We assessed the outpatients service as part of a comprehensive hospital location assessment on 9 and 10 December 2025. This was due to an aged rating as the service had not been inspected since May 2019. The service had addressed and improved the two requirement notices from our last inspection.

There were no previous breaches.

On this assessment we found the following examples of good practice;

• Since January 2024 outpatient’s department (OPD) staff had an improved coordinated leadership.
• Leads and managers had implemented areas of improvement. For example, they had developed a nurse-led uro-gynaecology service. This had proved to be valuable to people in their area and freed up doctors to see new patients.
• OPD had a staff group involved in developing a Unity framework and associated principles. This supported people who may have dementia, neurodiversity or learning disability needs. This work focussed on making services more accessible to people.
• OPD leads had undertaken quality improvement (QI) plans around cancellations and informed consent. The hospital’s cancellation rates had almost halved within six months.

However, we found areas for improvement;

• OPD had a lack of nursing presence or oversight. Lower grade staff were left to run the department.
• Not all staff told us leaders and managers were visible. Leaders would not always make themselves available when required.
• During our assessment five OPD staff members and one bank staff new starter were below the 90% provider trust target compliance for mandatory training.
• The department had no formal competency suite of skills. Lower grade staff had a lack of training or development opportunities.
• Four of the department’s 16 complaints in the six months before our assessment were categorised as ‘attitude of medical staff’. We could not evidence leads had put any wider measures in place to address these or other common complaint categories.
• Six consultants had a significantly higher percentage of appointments delayed over 45 minutes than the OPD total. We could not ensure leads acted on this information to improve consultant’s performance.

Outpatients was a small proportion of hospital activity. In 2025, the department had 35,677 appointments across all their specialties. The most common outpatient’s speciality was urology. This formed 29% of their year to date (YTD) total.

The hospital’s main service was surgery. Where services are the same, we have reported findings in the surgery section.

We spoke to 34 clinical and non-clinical staff of various grades.

We rated this service as good because it was safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led.

People's experience of this service

We spoke to ten outpatients and their relatives. All were very positive and complimentary about the service.