Archived: Dr Michael John Heber Also known as Cobtree Medical Practice

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Dr Michael John Heber on 3 November 2015. Overall the practice is rated as outstanding.

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

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents and near misses. Opportunities for learning from internal and external incidents were maximised.

• The practice used innovative and proactive methods to improve patient outcomes, working with other local providers to share best practice. There were monthly multidisciplinary meetings. The practice had used software to identify patients with conditions which might otherwise have been missed.

• Feedback from patients about their care was positive and was consistently significantly better than local and national feedback.

• The practice worked closely with other organisations and with the local community in planning how services were provided to ensure that they meet people’s needs. For example in their professional interactions with a local nursing home and the local independent school.

• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and from the patient participation group. For example in the way that services were made available to members of the traveller community.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs. Information about how to complain was available and easy to understand
• The practice had a clear vision which had quality and safety as its top priority. The strategy to deliver this vision had been produced with stakeholders and was regularly reviewed and discussed with staff.

There was an area of practice where the provider should make improvements:

• The practice should check and reconcile the controlled drugs register

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• The GP was available to staff from the local nursing home both out of hours and at weekends for advice on avoiding admission to hospital or end of life care.

• GPs gave their personal contact telephone numbers to patients who were dying at home and were contactable in the event of a crisis.

• The practice used a wide range of information and specialist software to review the effectiveness of its care and treatment.

• The practice had written up several anonymised cases where patients, who wished to die at home, had been supported to do so. These had been presented as significant events so as to share best practice.

• Data showed that patients rated the practice higher, for the caring and the responsive aspects of its services, than all the local and national averages.

• Governance and performance management arrangements were under constant review. The practice actively sought out and used data from wide range of sources.

• The practice had proactively recruited patients to the patient participation group so that it was truly representative of the practice demographic.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice