Updated 20 January 2025
Date of Assessment: 24 and 26 June 2025. Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust is located at V7 Building, Kings Business Park, Kings Drive, Prescot, Liverpool L34 1PJ. Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust is the registered provider for the CQC registered Walk in Centres across Liverpool and Sefton. This assessment was carried out at the Liverpool Urgent Treatment Centre located at Linda McCartney Centre, Prescot Street, Liverpool, L7 8XP. The centre provides consultations, advice and treatment for minor injuries and illnesses. Opening hours for the centre are 8am to 8pm. The service is nurse led, and the team includes advanced paediatric nurse practitioners, advanced nurse practitioners, nurses, administration and reception staff. Patients are advised that after booking in at reception, they will be seen by a triage nurse who will assess the clinical priority of their condition and ensure they are safe to wait in the department. Based on this assessment, and according to their level of priority, they will then receive a more detailed consultation from a nurse practitioner.
We last undertook a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection at the service in November 2018 and the service was rated as requires improvement overall.
At this assessment the rating has changed to good overall. We assessed all five key questions to establish if the services provided were safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. We rated safe as requires improvement and effective, caring, responsive and well-led as good.
A requires improvement rating has been given for the safe key question. We found one breach of regulation in relation to Regulation 12 HSCA (RA) Regulations 2014 Safe care and treatment. The provider did not have full and reliable systems for appropriate and safe handling of medicines. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.
Leaders and staff prioritised safety, openness and joint working. Safety events were investigated, and lessons were learnt to identify any shortfalls, prevent a recurrence, and embed good practice. However, feedback from staff indicated the outcomes of investigations were not always fed back to them.
There was an effective process to identify, understand, monitor and address current and future risks including risks to patient safety.
The service had a triage system in place to facilitate prioritisation according to clinical need where more serious cases or young children could be prioritised as they arrived.
People could access the service easily and quickly so that they got the support and treatment they needed when they needed it.
The provider used data to inform, monitor and improve performance. Data indicated good outcomes for people who used the service with figures showing improvement in the achievement of key performance indicators for the number of patients triaged within 15 minutes and being assessed within 2-hour and 4-hour timeframes.
The culture and ethos of the service was to provide a high level of patient satisfaction, and this was evident across all areas of our assessment. Staff told us they worked well as a team to provide a high quality and caring service to patients.
Support was available for people with additional needs or communication needs. For example, people who required the services of an interpreter or patients who had a learning disability.
We observed that staff treated people with kindness, empathy and compassion and respected their privacy and dignity.
Structures, processes and systems to support good governance and management were clearly set out, understood and effective.
All staff we spoke with were clear on their individual roles and responsibilities and lines of accountability were clear. Managers met with staff regularly to complete appraisals and performance reviews.
The provider worked collaboratively and in partnership with relevant external stakeholders, commissioners and partner agencies to provide and develop services.