Karis Medical Centre

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Karis Medical Centre on 16 August 2019.

We carried out an inspection of this service following our annual review of the information available to us including information provided by the practice. Our review indicated that there may have been a significant change to the quality of care provided since the last inspection.

This inspection focused on the following key questions:

• Effective
• Caring
• Well-led

Because of the assurance received from our review of information we carried forward the ratings for the following key questions:

• Safe
• Responsive

We have rated this practice as Good overall.

We rated the practice as outstanding for providing Caring services because:

• The practice demonstrated continued work within the community and with organisations established by the practice to ensure that their patients have their needs met. The practice demonstrated a committed and proactive approach and culture that led to positive outcomes for patients.
• Feedback from patients, those who are close to them and stakeholders was continually positive about the way staff treated people.
• The practice had employed a dedicated member of staff (health and wellbeing support worker) to ensure that all patients, carers and loved ones had access to the services provided by community support organisations, most notably, the Karis Neighbour Scheme.
• The practice had also employed an in-house counsellor to ensure that patient’s social, emotional, physical, clinical and mental health needs were met in a dedicated, holistic and person-centred approach to care.
• The practice had extended its intake boundaries to include any local hostels as it had assessed that these patients were struggling to get access to primary care. This population however, was highly transitory and this created challenges to getting accurate data in relation to performance.

We rated the practice as Requires Improvement for providing Effective services because:

• The practice was not yet able to demonstrate that childhood immunisation or cancer screening uptake was in line with national targets. This affected both the “working age” and “Families, children and young people” population groups. The practice told us that this was partly due to the large hostel population and very transient population they serve and records we viewed confirmed this.

We rated the practice as Good for providing Well-led services because:

• There were innovative approaches to providing integrated person-centred care.
• The practice had identified areas where there were gaps in provision locally and had taken steps to address them.
• The practice leadership team demonstrated capacity and capability to drive a culture of person-centred care.

Whilst we found no breaches of regulations, the provider should:

• Continue to ensure that systems for formal clinical supervision of nursing and healthcare staff become embedded and are operating effectively.
• Continue to review tasks on the clinical system to ensure that they are appropriate.

Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care