St Rocco's Hospice

Updated 28 February 2020

St Rocco’s Hospice is operated by St Rocco’s Hospice, a registered charity. The hospice opened in 1985 in a former location and moved to this location in Bewsey, Warrington in 1999. The hospice primarily serves the communities of Warrington.

The hospice has one inpatient ward with 10 single bedrooms. In addition, the service offers 30 day therapy places at its Vitality Centre which is located within the hospice. The centre offers care, support and activities on an outpatient basis.

The hospice is funded by income generated through its fundraising and voluntary donations, and through some additional NHS funding. The hospice works collaboratively with the local clinical commissioning group to develop integrated specialist palliative care services.

The hospice previously had two registered managers, who shared the role, one was the hospice clinical outreach manager and the other the inpatient manager. Both managers had been in post since March 2019.

At the time of our inspection the Clinical Lead for Outreach Services had just taken on the sole role as the registered manager and was registered with the CQC in March 2019. The former In Patient Unit manager had de-registered.

Updated 28 February 2020

St Rocco’s Hospice is operated by St Rocco’s Hospice, a registered charity. Staff provided care to adults 18 years and upwards from across the Warrington area. It has one inpatient ward with 10 single bedrooms.

The hospice offers 30-day therapy places at its Vitality Centre which is located within the hospice. The centre offers care, support and activities on an outpatient basis. Therapies include complementary therapies, alongside physiotherapy and occupational therapy services. Craft sessions and social activities are also available. 

In addition, other services provided are:

The Hospice at Home team who provide a dedicated home-based sitting service to enable patients to get home from hospital or to enable and support death at home. 

The hospice operates a telephone advice line 24 hours a day, seven days a week for hospice patients and a designated telephone support line for GPs Monday-Friday.  

A counselling and emotional care service provides bereavement, counselling and spiritual support to patients and their families.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out a short-announced inspection on 19 and 20 November 2019.  

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? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Services we rate

Our rating of this service stayed the same. We rated it as Good overall.

• The service had enough staff to care for patients and keep them safe. Staff had training in key skills, understood how to protect patients from abuse, and managed safety well. The service controlled infection risk well. Staff assessed risks to patients, acted on them and kept good care records. They managed medicines well. The service managed safety incidents well and learned lessons from them. Staff collected safety information and used it to improve the service.

• Staff provided good care and treatment, gave patients enough to eat and drink, and gave them pain relief when they needed it. Managers monitored the effectiveness of the service and made sure staff were competent. Staff worked well together for the benefit of patients, advised them on how to lead healthier lives, supported them to make decisions about their care, and had access to good information. Key services were available seven days a week.

• Staff treated patients with compassion and kindness, respected their privacy and dignity, took account of their individual needs, and helped them understand their conditions. They provided emotional support to patients, families and carers.

• The service planned care to meet the needs of local people, took account of patients’ individual needs, and made it easy for people to give feedback. People could access the service when they needed it and did not have to wait too long for treatment.

• Leaders ran services well using reliable information systems and supported staff to develop their skills. Staff understood the service’s vision and values, and how to apply them in their work. Staff felt respected, supported and valued. They were focused on the needs of patients receiving care. Staff were clear about their roles and accountabilities. The service engaged well with patients and the community to plan and manage services and all staff were committed to improving services continually.

We found areas of outstanding practice:

• The service had direct access to electronic information held by community services, including GPs. This meant that hospice staff could access up-to-date information about patients, for example, details of their current medicines.

We found areas of practice that require improvement:

• Risk assessments were not always updated every 72 hours in line with the hospice’s procedure

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve.

Ann Ford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (North West)

Updated 28 February 2020

The hospice provided care to adults requiring specialist palliative and end of life care following a diagnosis of a life limiting condition. The hospice has 10 inpatient beds, a dedicated day centre service and provides outpatient appointments.

We rated this service as good overall with all key questions rated as good.