Archived: Ealing Urgent Care Centre

Updated 4 October 2017

Ealing Urgent Care Centre (UCC) is commissioned by Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to provide an urgent care service within the London borough of Ealing. The service is located at Ealing Hospital and is in a shared location with the A&E department. The service is regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to provide the regulated activities of diagnostic and screening procedures and treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

No patients are registered at the service as it is designed to meet the needs of patients who have an urgent medical concern but do not require accident and emergency treatment. Patients attend on a walk-in basis. Patients can self-present or they may be directed to the service, for example by the NHS 111 or their own GP. Patients presenting to the service are ‘streamed’ by  either a nurse or care practitioners to determine the urgency and nature of their presenting complaint.

The Ealing Urgent Care Centre attends to around 62,500 patients per year. The service is provided by Greenbrook Healthcare which provides centralised governance for the service. On site the service is led by a UCC service manager, a UCC lead GP and a UCC lead nurse who have oversight of the urgent care centre and a team of UCC doctors/nurses, care practitioners; paediatric nurses and administration and reception staff.

The nursing staff were employed via the London Northwest Health Trust (acute trust) and all other clinicians were directly employed by Greenbrook Healthcare. However there were draft proposals to move nurse recruitment from the acute trust to Greenbrook Healthcare to maximise chances of successful recruitment.

The Ealing Urgent Care Centre treats and discharges 62% of all Accident and Emergency site attendances at Ealing Hospital. A small proportion (9%) of UCC attendances require hospital intervention and are referred accordingly to other departments.

Updated 4 October 2017

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Ealing Urgent Care Centre on 20 & 29 June 2017. Overall the service is rated as good.

Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:

• There was an open and transparent approach to safety and an effective system in place for recording, reporting and learning from incidents.
• Risks to patients were assessed and well managed.
• Patients’ care needs were assessed and delivered in a timely way according to need. The service met the National Quality Requirements.
• Staff assessed patients’ needs and delivered care in line with current evidence based guidance. Staff had been trained to provide them with the skills, knowledge and experience to deliver effective care and treatment.
• There was a system in place that enabled staff access to patient records. The UCC staff provided information to other services, for example the local GP and hospital following contact with patients as appropriate.
• The service managed patients’ care and treatment in a timely way.
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
• Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand. Improvements were made to the quality of care as a result of complaints and concerns.
• The service worked proactively with other organisations and providers to develop services that supported alternatives to hospital admission where appropriate and improved the patient experience.
• The service had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.
• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt supported by management. The service proactively sought feedback from staff and patients, which it acted on.
• The provider was aware of and complied with the requirements of the duty of candour.

The areas where the provider should make improvement are:

• Maintain arrangements for the safe tracking of prescription logs.

We saw areas of outstanding practice:

• The service had developed a paediatric observation bay, following the removal of onsite acute paediatric services at Ealing Hospital in July 2016.The service had recognised the need to develop robust pathways to manage and transfer very sick children to nearby paediatric units. The unit had a specific paediatric observation area with dedicated paediatric nursing staff.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice