Greater Lancashire Hospital is operated by Bespoke Healthcare Holdings Ltd who acquired it as Sandon House Clinic in January 2014. The clinic has recently changed its name to Greater Lancashire Hospital. Sandon House Clinic remains but for the cosmetic surgery side of the business only.

We inspected the main core service of surgery using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection on 15 and 16 September 2016 and an unannounced visit to the hospital on 23 September 2016 as part of our national programme to inspect and rate all independent hospitals.

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.

Whilst outpatient and diagnostic imaging services were provided, outpatient activity was provided by another independent provider and diagnostic imaging was only undertaken as part of a particular surgical procedure (guided spinal injections using a single C-arm X-ray machine). We have therefore not inspected outpatient activity and, where we have inspected diagnostic imaging, this is included in findings about surgery.

We rated Greater Lancashire Hospital as good overall. We have judged the service as ‘outstanding’ for caring. We also rated the hospital as ‘good’ for safe, responsive and well-led care.