St Anthony’s Hospital is operated by Spire Healthcare. The hospital has 92 beds in en-suite rooms. Facilities include six operating theatres (three with laminar flow), a cardiac catheter laboratory for cardiac procedures and an eight-bed level three critical care unit, and X-ray, outpatient and diagnostic facilities.

St Anthony’s provides surgery, including critical care, medical care, services for children and young people, and outpatients and diagnostic imaging. In this inspection we only inspected critical care and services for children and young people. These services had been suspended at the time of our inspection in September 2016 and had since re-opened. The children’s outpatient service opened in 2016 and sees about 150 children a month. The children’s ward, for day case surgery for children over three years old, opened in late February 2017.

The hospital carries out some surgery for adult NHS patients some of whom might be in critical care.

This inspection was a focused inspection looking only at critical care and services for children and young people (including children’s outpatients not inspected as part of outpatients in September 2016). We visited unannounced on 6 June 2017, and made two follow up visits by arrangement with the hospital on 12 and 13 June 2017 to observe children’s outpatients and a children’s surgery list which had not been able to inspect on 6 June 2017.

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

We rated critical care as requires improvement for safe and good for responsive and well led. We rated children’s services as good for Safe, Responsive and Well-led. We did not consider there was sufficient evidence to rate Effective and Caring for either service because there were few outcome measures for either service and we saw only a small number of patients during our inspection.