St Albans City Hospital

The Inspection visit took place on 11 February – 12 March 2020. 

St Albans City Hospital has a minor injury unit (MIU) which is open from 9am to 8pm, seven days a week, two surgical wards with a total of 40 beds and an outpatients department and diagnostic and imaging services. 

At this inspection, we inspected urgent and emergency care. We did not inspect surgery or outpatients at this inspection.

From January 2019 to December 2019 there were 15,695 attendances at the MIU. Attendances were increasing from 2019 to 2020; 1067 patients were treated in January 2019 and 1297 patients were seen in January 2020. 

We inspected the whole core service of Urgent and emergency care as part of our inspection programme. Our inspection was unannounced to enable us to observe routine activity. 

The MIU had previously been inspected in November 2018 which resulted in conditions being imposed on the trust’s registration. This required the trust to ensure that all patients who presented to the MIU were assessed within fifteen minutes of arrival by a suitably trained member of staff. This was to ensure that in the event an extremely sick patient presented to the unit, they would be assessed and treated in a timely way. 

During our inspection, we spoke with five members of staff and five patients, and we reviewed 15 sets of patient records which included adult and paediatric records. We also followed up on the enforcement actions we served following our previous inspection.