Archived: Roberts House

Updated 31 May 2022

Roberts House is run by Perfect Image Consultants Ltd. The service opened in August 2009 and was registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) on 01 October 2010.

Roberts House is an independent healthcare service. The service performs both registered and unregistered activity. Roberts House is registered with the CQC for diagnostic and screening and surgical procedures to people over the age of 18. The regulated services that Roberts House provides include removal lipomas and drainage of cysts.

The service has had a registered manager in post since May 2011 who is now the only employed clinician performing regulated activity.

Following our comprehensive inspection in September 2021, the service was rated inadequate and we suspended the registration of the provider and placed them in special measures. We re-inspected the service in November 2021, January 2022 and again in April 2022 and found that the service had not made all the required improvements, therefore, we suspended the registration of the provider for a further six weeks.

Updated 31 May 2022

Roberts House is operated by Perfect Image Consultants. The service provides surgical procedures to adults only. We inspected the service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. The service was previously inspected in April 2019 but was not rated at this time. 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?

We rated it as inadequate because:

• Staff did not have training in key skills or how to protect patients from abuse or the risk of abuse. They were not able to demonstrate they provided safe care. The service was not controlling infection risk well in the theatre environment. Staff were potentially unable to care for deteriorating patients as some equipment was out of date or not functional. The service was not clear about how to manage safety incidents.
• Managers did not monitor the effectiveness of the service and had not provided staff with guidance to provide care based on national guidance. Staff did not work with other healthcare professionals for the benefit of patients. Patients were not always given a 14-day cooling off period before cosmetic surgery was carried out.
• The service did not work with others in the wider system to support patient care and did not provide translation services for patients with barriers to communication.
• Leaders lacked insight into the problems identified at the service and there were no clear governance processes. The service had no clear vision or values for staff to work towards. The service did not engage well with patients, staff or wider health care providers to plan and manage services and staff were not committed to improving services continually.

However:

• The service had enough staff to care for patients and the environment was visibly clean. They stored medicines safely.
• There was the correct pain relief to give patients and key services were contactable seven days a week. Managers made sure staff were clinically competent to carry out their role.
• Eligible patients could access care promptly and were able to make a complaint about the care they received if they were unhappy.

As a result of this inspection, we took urgent action to suspend the registration of the provider for an initial period of eight weeks. We are also placing the service into 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 overall or for any key question or core service, 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 vary the provider’s registration to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.

Updated 16 November 2021

Surgical procedures were a small component of the total activities that the provider offered and were the only part of the service that CQC regulates. We rated this service as inadequate as we found safe and well led were inadequate and effective and responsive required improvement. We were not able to rate caring, as there was not enough evidence to rate.