Bere Clinic

Bere clinic is an independent hospital that is provided by Elysium Healthcare Limited. It is a specialist inpatient eating disorder service for a maximum of 12 young people. It opened in January 2022 and this was the first inspection.

We rated the service as good because:

• Staff maintained a strong culture of person-centred care. Staff treated young people with compassion and kindness and respected their privacy and dignity. Young people and their families told us that they felt safe in the hospital. That their risks were safely managed, and that staff were kind, caring and understanding.
• Leaders and staff were passionate and proactive about minimising the use of restrictive practices such as restraint.
• The service provided safe care. The environment was clean, well-maintained and welcoming. Staff assessed and managed risk well, managed medicines safely and followed good practice with respect to safeguarding.
• Staff developed holistic, recovery-oriented, person centred care plans informed by a comprehensive assessment. They provided a range of treatments suitable to meet the needs of young people and in line with national best practice guidance.
• Managers ensured that staff received training, including specialist eating disorder training. The ward staff worked well together as a multidisciplinary team.
• Staff understood and discharged their roles and responsibilities under the Mental Health Act 1983 and the Mental Capacity Act 2005.
• Managers provided a strong and visible presence within the service. Staff felt respected, supported and valued, and spoke highly of leaders.

However:

• Although some staff had recently been recruited, there were vacancies in some key multidisciplinary roles, such as an occupational therapist and family therapist. This meant that young people and families did not have access to all therapies to support their recovery.
• A range of leadership, nurse and healthcare assistant posts were vacant. This meant that the hospital director was often required to support clinically which took them away from other duties such as supervising staff.
• Staff told us they were not receiving supervision in line with the provider’s policy.
• The service did not have a process in place for monitoring the quality of the young peoples’ care files and to ensure that updates about care and treatment were recorded and available to staff delivering care.
• Some potential ligature anchor points existed that could have been removed. This included window restrictors and bathroom doors.