St Albans Dental Centre

Updated 3 August 2017

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the practice was meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

We undertook an announced focused inspection of St Albans Dental Centre on 8 June 2017. This inspection was carried out to check that improvements to meet legal requirements planned by the practice after our comprehensive inspection on 21 January 2016 and focused inspection on 15 March 2017 had been made. We inspected the practice against one of the five questions we ask about services: is the service Well - Led. This is because the service was not meeting some legal requirements.

The inspection was led by a CQC inspector who was accompanied by a Head of Inspection in Dentistry.

Updated 3 August 2017

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection of this practice on 21 January 2016. A breach of legal requirement was found. After the comprehensive inspection, the practice wrote to us to say what they would do to meet legal requirements in relation to Good Governance.

We undertook a focused inspection on15 March 2017 to check that they had followed their plan and to confirm that they now met legal requirements. Breaches of legal requirement were found during the focussed inspection in relation to Good Governance and Receiving and Acting on Complaints.

We undertook a further focussed inspection on 8 June 2017 to check that they now met legal requirements. This report only covers our findings in relation to those requirements. You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection and focused inspection, by selecting the 'all reports' link for St Albans Dental Centre on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

Our findings were:

Are services well-led?

We found that this practice was providing well-led care in accordance with the relevant regulations.

Background

St Albans Dental Centre is a general dental practice which is part of the Southern Dental corporate close to St Albans city centre in Hertfordshire. The practice offers predominantly NHS and some private dental treatment to adults and children.

The premises are located on the ground and first floor and consist of four treatment rooms, a reception area, a waiting room and a designated decontamination room.

The practice manager is the registered manager. A registered manager is a person who is registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the practice is run.

Our key findings were:

• The practice had completed an infection prevention and control audit. Staff had received training on how the audit tool was to be used.

• Radiography audits (designed to audit the quality of X-rays taken) had been completed on three out of four clinicians. Clinicians had started personal audits of their X-rays these were at a data collection stage, and had not been analysed to establish where improvements could be made.

• Records of complaints made to the practice were kept in the practice complaints folder and escalated to head office.

• Complaints were logged and tracked to ensure that appropriate action was taken and trends were recognised.