Archived: Woodlands Hospice

Updated 4 May 2017

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

The inspection team consisted of an adult social care inspector.

Before our inspection we looked at the notifications and other intelligence the Care Quality Commission had received about the hospice.

During the inspection we spent time with registered manager and nominated individual (responsible person) for the hospice. We reviewed procedures in place to safeguard patients from abuse and how reported incidents were managed.

Updated 4 May 2017

We carried out an unannounced comprehensive inspection of this service in May 2016 when a breach of legal requirement was found. We found a breach in regulation regarding the service not having robust procedures in place to make sure patients were protected from abuse.

After the comprehensive inspection, the provider wrote to us to tell us what they would do to meet legal requirements in relation to the breaches. We undertook a focused inspection on 12 April 2017 to check that they had they now met legal requirements.

On this inspection we found improvements had been made and the service was now meeting requirements.

This report only covers our findings in relation to the specific area / breach of regulation. This covered one question we normally asked of services; whether they are 'safe'. Although ‘well led’ was rated as good at the last inspection, we looked at this domain in respect of the improvements around the management of safeguarding procedures.

The question 'was the service effective’, ‘was the service responsive' and ‘was the service caring' were not assessed at this inspection. You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the 'all reports' link for Woodlands Hospice on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

There was a registered manager in post at the time of our inspection. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Woodlands Hospice is an independent charity situated in the grounds of University Hospital Aintree. Woodlands is based in North Liverpool and covers a population of 330,000 in North Liverpool, South Sefton and Kirkby in Knowsley. The hospice provides 15 overnight beds in a purpose built wing (in-patient unit).

Woodlands has a multi professional team of staff who provide specialist palliative care to people who have a life threatening illness and for people who are in the terminal stage of their disease. Palliative care is the total care of people whose illness is not responsive to curative treatment.

Other services provided by the hospice include day therapy services (well-being and support centre), community therapy, outreach and outpatient services and a hospice at home service for South Sefton patients only.

Hospice at home provides a sitting service, support for the district nurse team, accompanied transfer home from hospital or hospice and crisis intervention. This service is provided by the staff from Woodlands and is commissioned by South Sefton.

Woodlands Hospice medical staff visit people in their own home to advise the community team on appropriate management if this is needed. This is to prevent a crisis or inappropriate hospital admission if the person's preferred place of care is home.

At the previous inspection we found the service did not always follow their safeguarding policy and act in accordance with the local authority’s safeguarding procedures. At this inspection we reviewed the hospice’s safeguarding policy and procedure, looked at how incidents were reported and recorded and assessed staff. We reviewed a number of documents in respect of safeguarding procedures, reported incidents and systems and processes in place to assure safeguarding procedures were monitored effectively. This breach of regulation had been met.