Archived: The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety

Updated 2 January 2020

The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety is a trading business of the University of Surrey. It is located in a building within a research park. The building has wheelchair access and consulting rooms are accessible on the ground floor.

The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety is registered with the Care Quality Commission under the Health and Social care Act 2008 to provide the following regulated activity:

• Treatment of disease, disorder or injury and diagnostic and screening procedures.

The service provides independent travel health advice, travel and non-travel vaccinations and blood tests for antibody screening. Services are offered to clients over the age of 12 months intending to travel abroad. Clients can receive both information and necessary vaccinations, and medicines. The clinic is also a registered Yellow Fever vaccination centre. The service is staffed by a team of registered nurses qualified in travel vaccination.

Travel clinic opening times are: Monday 8.40am to 4.30pm, Wednesday 12pm to 8pm and Saturday 8.30am to 3.30 pm.

The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety runs services from 4 Huxley Road, The Surrey Research Park, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7RE.

Further information can be found on the services website,

During our visit we:

• Spoke with receptionists, administrative staff and travel nurses, one of whom is the registered manager and the nominated manager who is a registered nurse.

• Reviewed comment cards where clients shared their views and experiences of the service.

• Looked at documents the clinic used to carry out services, including policies and procedures.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we always ask the following five questions:

• Is it safe?

• Is it effective?

• Is it caring?

• Is it responsive to people’s needs?

• Is it well-led?

These questions therefore formed the framework for the areas we looked at during the inspection.

Updated 2 January 2020

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety as part of our inspection programme and to follow up on previous breaches of regulations.

CQC inspected the service on 02 July 2018 and asked the provider to make improvements regarding infection control. We checked these as part of this comprehensive inspection and found that the provider had not made sufficient improvement to address those concerns.

This service is registered with CQC under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 in respect of some, but not all, of the services it provides. There are some general exemptions from regulation by CQC which relate to particular types of service and these are set out in of The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. At The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety services are provided to clients under arrangements made by their employer. These types of arrangements are exempt by law from CQC regulation. Therefore, at The Robens Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, we were only able to inspect the services which are not arranged for clients by their employers.

The clinical director is the registered manager. A registered manager is a person who is 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. The provider also had a nominated individual, this is a person nominated by the organisation to supervise the management of the regulated activities provided. Since our inspection the nominated individual who was in post at the time of our inspection has left the service and a new nominated individual is now in place.

We reviewed feedback from clients through the completion of 22 Care Quality Commission comment cards. Feedback was consistently positive, with clients telling us that staff treated them with kindness, dignity and respect. Clients also told us they felt they were given the information they needed to make decisions in a way that they could understand.

Our key findings were:

• The service was offered on a private, fee paying basis only.
• The clinic had good facilities and was equipped to treat clients and meet their needs.
• Assessments of a client’s treatment plans were thorough and followed national guidance.
• Clients received full and detailed explanations of any treatment options.
• The clinic encouraged and valued feedback from clients and staff.
• Feedback from clients was positive.
• There was a lack of effective governance processes in place including those related to the assessment and management of risk, oversight of training and management of health and safety.
• Staff had received basic training in infection control. However, there was a lack of processes in place to ensure the effective management of infection prevention.
• Systems and processes for protecting clients from abuse were not sufficient.
• There was little focus on continuous improvement and opportunities to learn from incidents and complaints were sometimes missed.

The areas where the provider must make improvements as they are in breach of regulations are:

• Ensure patients are protected from abuse and improper treatment
• Ensure all premises and equipment used by the service provider is fit for use
• Ensure care and treatment is provided in a safe way to patients.
• Establish effective systems and processes to ensure good governance in accordance with the fundamental standards of care.

(Please see the specific details on action required at the end of this report).

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Record verbal complaints and use them to improve the quality of care.
• Seek client feedback on clinical care in addition to customer satisfaction.
• Embed the use of quality improvement work into the culture of the service.
• Improve how clients can be involved in decisions about care and treatment, in particular client’s whose first language is not English and those with visual or hearing impairments.

I am placing this service in special measures. Services placed in special measures will be inspected again within six months. If insufficient improvements have been made such that there remains a rating of inadequate for any key question or overall, we will take action in line with our enforcement procedures to begin the process of preventing the provider from operating the service. This will lead to cancelling their registration or to varying the terms of their registration within six months if they do not improve.

The service will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action. Where necessary, another inspection will be conducted within a further six months, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to close the service by adopting our proposal to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.

Special measures will give people who use the service the reassurance that the care they get should improve.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care