Archived: The Cabin Surgery

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Cabin Surgery on 7 September 2016. Overall the practice is rated as good.

Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:

• The leadership and approachability of the principal GP underpinned safe and caring clinical care for patients.
• There was an open and transparent approach to safety and an effective system in place for reporting and recording significant events.
• The majority of risks to patients were assessed and well managed.
• Staff assessed patients’ needs and delivered care in line with current evidence based guidance. Staff had been trained to provide them with the skills, knowledge and experience to deliver effective care and treatment.
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
• Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand. Improvements were made to the quality of care as a result of complaints and concerns.
• There was good continuity of care, with urgent appointments available the same day, though the wait to see a named GP could be longer.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.
• The provider was aware of and complied with the requirements of the duty of candour.

We saw two areas of outstanding practice:

The principal GP conducted regular checks of patient consultations for all other clinicians. The GP regularly discussed areas for improvement with locums and employed clinical staff.

The practice was forward thinking in adapting to new guidance and best practice and created templates to support clinicians during consultations. Where appropriate, these were shared with other practices locally which improved patient care more widely.

The areas where the provider should make improvement are:

• Complete the action plan to introduce a legionella control regime as recommended by the water safety assessment.

• Conduct a risk assessment for substances stored in the boiler cupboard to demonstrate that potential risk to staff and patients is reduced.

• Consider the introduction of a formal complaints log to document complaints handling in line with the practice policy.

• Implement a system to check that cleaning has been carried out in line with the cleaning schedule.

• Review personnel management processes for recruitment and training to demonstrate records are consistently up to date for all employees, including GPs. The recruitment policy should be consistently applied to all new staff, including appropriate checks for all employees and clinicians prior to their commencement of employment. Complete the work to bring all annual staff appraisals into date.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice