Verivius for independent secondary care

Independent secondary care covers the private hospital and independent surgical-clinic tier in England: planned surgical admissions, day-case surgery, diagnostic and interventional procedures, consultant-led outpatient clinics, and the post-operative pathway including private pre-assessment and on-site recovery. Some providers are pure private payers; many run mixed NHS-funded and self-pay books under the same CQC registration.

The pack covers the regulated-activity scope that the inspector samples against: Treatment of Disease, Disorder or Injury; Surgical Procedures; Diagnostic and Screening Procedures; Family Planning where in scope. Outpatient-only services and dermatology-led private clinics sit in the adjacent Verivius for private clinics pack instead, because the evidence weight is different.

Independent secondary care is inspected under the same five CQC key questions (safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led) as the rest of the regulated sector. The evidence weighting differs from a community-services or social-care inspection. Inspectors sample surgical complication records in depth, look hard at consent quality for elective procedures (including financial-consent capture for self-pay patients), check the WHO surgical safety checklist compliance rate against case logs, verify resuscitation equipment + drug-expiry checks, sample anaesthetic charts + recovery records, and read the morbidity and mortality (M&M) meeting minutes against the actual case list.

Statutory layer: Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, including Regulation 20 (duty of candour), Regulation 18 (notifications to the regulator), Regulation 17 (good governance), Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment), and Regulation 13 (safeguarding adults and children). Care Quality Commission (Registration) Regulations 2009 set the statutory notification regime that Regulation 18 anchors.

Layered non-CQC regulation: General Medical Council for consultants in private practice; Nursing and Midwifery Council for nursing staff; Health and Care Professions Council for operating-department practitioners and other allied registrants; MHRA Yellow Card for device and drug safety reporting; Independent Healthcare Providers Network voluntary standards for cross-provider safety incident reporting. Verivius captures the governance trail once and surfaces what each layer needs to see.

The sector pack is the ISC-specific content pre-loaded into your account on top of the core Verivius platform:

• Surgical and anaesthetic incident categories: surgical complication (intra-operative and immediate post-operative), anaesthetic complication including awareness under anaesthesia and difficult-airway events, identification error covering wrong-site / wrong-procedure / wrong-patient, post-operative infection, unplanned return to theatre, unplanned transfer or readmission.
• Patient safety categories: hospital-acquired infection, venous thromboembolism event, pressure ulcer acquired during admission, deterioration not recognised, patient fall on the ward or post-operative unit, medication error across the prescribing / dispensing / administration chain, controlled-drug discrepancy.
• Consent and patient-selection records: elective-surgery consent including documented cooling-off for cosmetic-adjacent procedures, financial consent for self-pay patients, mental-capacity assessment where capacity is in question.
• Duty of candour evidence trail: moderate- harm-or-above threshold assessment at incident-log time, verbal-then-written notification records, apology documentation per Reg 20(3)(b), interim updates, final outcome letter. Linked to the source incident.
• Assurance calendar items:weekly resuscitation equipment check, monthly emergency-drug expiry audit, monthly controlled-drug stock audit, quarterly WHO surgical safety checklist compliance audit, quarterly M&M meeting log, annual consultant practising privileges review, annual GMC appraisal tracking for each consultant on the privileges list.
• Training matrix templates for ISC roles: consultant surgeon, consultant anaesthetist, theatre nurse, ODP, recovery nurse, ward nurse, pre-assessment nurse, ward HCA. Includes mandatory training plus role-specific competencies (e.g. ALS / ILS, paediatric life support where applicable, intermediate-care airway for theatre nurses, conscious-sedation competencies for the relevant cohort).
• Sample policies: consent for elective surgery, WHO surgical safety checklist procedure, medication management including controlled drugs, deteriorating-patient escalation (NEWS2 / paediatric equivalent), VTE risk assessment, hospital-acquired infection surveillance, duty of candour, statutory notifications.
• Mock Inspection methodology calibrated to ISC evidence categories and the inspector-sampled record types above.

The ISC sector setup is live in Verivius v1. The taxonomy (surgical and anaesthetic complications, patient safety, equipment and medication safety, consent, complaints, safeguarding routing, near miss), frameworks (Duty of Candour, CQC Reg 18 notifications, MHRA Yellow Card, GMC and NMC professional-regulator referrals, local-authority safeguarding) and assurance calendar (resuscitation, controlled drugs, WHO surgical safety checklist, M&M log, consultant privileges, GMC appraisal) are populated and verified against primary regulatory sources. You can sign up directly and have the ISC content loaded into your account from day one.

If you run a private hospital or surgical clinic and want to take a look before signing up, get in touch using the form below.