Parkway

Ratings - Outpatients

• Overall

  Good

• Safe

  Good

• Effective

  Good

• Caring

  Good

• Responsive

  Good

• Well-led

  Requires improvement

Our view of the service

We commenced a responsive inspection of outpatients at Parkway from 2-3 June 2025, which took place because of concerns people had raised about the service. We assessed 33 quality statements across safe, effective, caring, responsive, and well led. We have combined the score for these areas to give the overall inspection rating for outpatients at Parkway.

The service provides outpatient Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) clinics that are based both at the main Parkway site and across 9 satellite clinics located in Manchester, Preston, and Chorley. The service is consultant-led and receives over 600 referrals a month. Clinics are supported by nurses and healthcare assistants and see people for a variety of routine ENT complaints. Only adults are seen in Manchester, although both children and adults may be seen within the Preston and Chorley local authorities.

Parkway provides an audiology service to support the work of ENT clinics, with diagnostic testing provided on-demand, including for children at the Preston and Chorley sites. The audiology service also runs standalone clinics for both private and NHS service users, providing hearing assessment and hearing aid provision to adults. Our assessment only included parts of the regulated activity for which we inspect, which was the audiology activity to support ENT clinics and when testing children.

At our last inspection we rated outpatients as good. At this inspection the rating remains good.

The service had a focus on providing care that was easily accessible, and waiting times were consistently good. The audiology service is actively seeking to innovate in its practice and recently received IQIPS (Improving Quality in Physiological Services) accreditation in its drive to continuously improve.

However, the service had not identified that all staff who routinely saw children as part of their clinical practice needed a higher level of safeguarding training than had been completed. This meant that managers could not be assured that such staff have the required level of competence to identify and act on children’s safeguarding concerns.

Findings that relate to the overall service and are not specific to outpatients are reported in the surgery section, where indicated.

People's experience of this service

During the inspection we spoke to service users and their families who all provided positive feedback about the service and staff. We observed kind and compassionate interactions between staff and service users and saw correspondence from the service that was sensitive to individuals’ needs.