- NHS hospital
City Health Campus
Report from 9 July 2025 assessment
Ratings - Surgery
Our view of the service
We carried out a comprehensive inspection of surgery services at Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre (BMEC) on 16 October 2025. The service was last inspected in 2017. We rated the service as Good as there was a good learning culture, staff worked with patients to manage risk and there were safe systems and pathways in place. Staff delivered evidence-based, person-centred care and treatment, and behaved with kindness and compassion towards patients and each other. The service was well-led, with a focus on continuous learning and improvement.
Previous breaches for surgery including BMEC were to ‘ensure measures are in place to prevent further Never Events to protect patient’s safety’ and to ‘ensure BMEC mandatory training targets for all clinical staff are met and recorded’. Some improvements had been made in mandatory training recording and rates overall, but there was a breach of regulation around completion of mandatory training in this inspection. There had been no further Never Events in surgery, although there had been a Never Event in July 2025 in the outpatient department.
People's experience of this service
The patients we spoke with were generally happy with the care and treatment they received. They said staff treated them with kindness and explained things in a way they could understand. Patients found they could access food choices to accommodate their needs, and the environment was accessible. However, they could not always navigate the site easily and did not always have the information they needed in appointment letters. They reflected that arriving as part of a patient cohort for day surgery made for a long day.