Updated
15 October 2026
Dearne Valley NHS Dialysis Unit is operated by Fresenius Medical Care renal services limited, an independent healthcare provider. It is a private medical dialysis unit in the grounds of Montagu Hospital, in the town of Mexborough. The unit primarily serves the communities of the South Yorkshire and surrounding areas as part of the Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust. It also accepts patient referrals from outside the area.
It is contracted by the local NHS trust to provide renal dialysis to NHS patients over the age of 18. Patients are referred to the unit by the trust. The main referring unit is a local NHS renal unit.
It is a 12-station unit which treats 48 patients. The equipment used includes Fresenius dialysis machines for treating people with kidney failure.
The unit provides haemodialysis for stable patients with end stage renal disease or failure. They are open six days a week from Monday to Saturday at morning and afternoon sessions. There are no overnight facilities. There are two dialysis treatment sessions a day. As staff can treat up to 12 patients per session, they have capacity to dialyse 24 patients daily.
We last inspected the service in October 2017. This was to check progress against our warning notice from the comprehensive inspection in April 2017. We did not rate any domains.
On this assessment we spoke with the registered manager, deputy manager, clinical secretary and six staff members.
Updated
19 December 2025
Good practice
- Leads encouraged shared care across the service. Staff clearly explained the process to patients, along with how to access and competently document their shared care. The service had shared care tasks of the month.
Areas for improvement
- The service did not always follow the provider’s clear responsibilities, roles, systems of accountability or good governance. For example, the RM had not completed sections of both the latest annual fire risk assessments from May and December 2025. They had scored the unit’s fire risk as 3; graded low, based on incomplete information. This meant they could not evidence all necessary fire hazards and mitigations had been acted upon.
- We found 7 dialysis machines were slightly past their servicing date in mid-May 2026. One was overdue a service since January 2026. The RM notified technical support who would service these within a few weeks of our assessment.
- Documentation did not always grade incidents by severity or categorise them into different themes. This meant the service could not evidence staff knew the service’s most severe and common incident types
- The service did not investigate incidents in line with NHS England’s patient safety incident response framework (PSIRF). This contractual requirement was rolled out across all health and social care organisations up to autumn 2023. This meant service leads could not maximise learning opportunities across the organisation.
- Service leads did not maintain their local risk register. This meant managers could not evidence that all potential risks to the service were considered, reviewed or updated to mitigate harm to patients, staff and visitors.
Improvement actions
The service should ensure infectious patients are always barriered to fully mitigate potential risks of exposure to unaware patients or visitors.
The provider should ensure leads and managers implement a formal or effective system in place to identify, address and monitor risks so managers and staff are aware of those which affect their service.