Beechwood Hall

Updated 26 June 2020

Beechwood Hall is operated by InHealth Limited. The service opened in 2011. Its head office is located in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The service has one nominated individual with 12 registered managers responsible for different types of screening and managerial support.

The service works within both the NHS and private sector to provide mobile diagnostic imaging services. At the time of inspection, Beechwood Hall operated from 300 locations across the UK and served 3 million patients each year.

Beechwood Hall provides both direct access and host organisation diagnostic support services from either mobile or fixed community and acute locations. It manages either end to end patient pathways or individual aspects of care to suit the needs of commissioning organisations.

The report references individual sites as specific examples, however these have been corroborated across all sites inspected.

Updated 26 June 2020

Beechwood Hall is operated by InHealth Limited. Beechwood Hall provides a country wide mobile service. Services are provided in a range of locations including mobile units, stand-alone diagnostic centres or within rented rooms within community or hospital healthcare sites.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection at the providers head office on 4 February 2020, along with unannounced inspections of six different types of diagnostic services between 4 and 14 February 2020, across 21 sites country wide.

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.

Services we rate

We rated this service as Outstanding overall as we found many areas of outstanding practice:

• The nature of the service being provided out of small clinics and mobile units meant the service was very flexible. The focus was on providing patients with a service that meant they had choice as to dates, times and locations of services.

• The culture of the organisation was focused on the patient experience and how to provide outstanding care. We saw numerous examples of staff going ‘above and beyond’ which we have detailed within the report.

• Staff working in Magnetic Resonance Imaging had completed a large project in conjunction with a patient network group to use the eight C’s of caring; consider, compassion, comfort, confidence, communication, control, calming and change, to better understand patient anxiety in relation to scans and make changes to practice as a result of these findings.

• Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm screening staff provided services at residential and nursing homes to support patients with difficulties getting to a clinic. This was to support older men, the group of patients most likely to suffer an aneurysm.

• Staff worked with learning disability nurses to promote the importance of breast screening for patients with learning disabilities. This was after a project found that health screening for patients focused on their learning disability rather than other possible co-morbidities.

• The strong culture of improvement and innovation from the managerial team allowed staff to develop their skills and the service to improve.

Following this inspection, we told the provider it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. Details are at the end of the report.

Nigel Acheson Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (London and South)

Updated 26 June 2020

The service had enough staff to care for patients and keep them safe. Staff had training in key skills, understood how to protect patients from abuse, and managed safety well. The service controlled infection risk well. Staff assessed risks to patients, acted on them and kept good care records. They managed medicines well. The service managed safety incidents well and learned lessons from them.

Staff provided good care and treatment. Managers monitored the effectiveness of the service and made sure staff were competent. Staff worked well together for the benefit of patients, supported them to make decisions about their care, and had access to good information.

Staff treated patients with compassion and kindness, respected their privacy and dignity, took account of their individual needs, and helped them understand their conditions. They provided emotional support to patients, families and carers.

Services were tailored to meet the needs of individuals and were delivered in a way to ensure flexibility, choice and continuity of care. Individual needs and preferences were central to the planning and delivery of tailored services

The leadership, governance and culture were used to drive and improve the delivery of high- quality person-centred care. Governance and performance management arrangements were proactively reviewed and reflected best practice.