Background to this inspection
Updated
6 April 2020
Oak Street Medical Practice is located in Norwich, Norfolk, within the Norfolk Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and provides services to 8,000 patients under the terms of a General medical services (GMS) contract. This is a contract between general practices and NHS England for delivering services to the local community.
The provider forms part of the OneNorwich Practices Primary Care Network, a group of 22 GP practices collaborating through four ‘neighbourhoods’ with an aim to promote and maintain sustainable resilient general practice that can deliver enhanced local care and treatment services to 213,000 patients.
Oak street Medical Practice has six GP partners, two full time, four part time of which four are male and two are female. The practice has one male and one female salaried GPs. There are three female practice nurses and three female health care assistants. The practice also employs full-time a practice manager, a practice pharmacist, a reports and vasectomy surgery administrator, two prescription officers, eight patient care advisers, one IT research support administrator and three secretaries.
Oak Street Medical Practice is an accredited training practice for specialist trainee and foundation year doctors, all six partners are honorary senior lecturers in the faculty of medicine at the University of East Anglia and deliver training to 3 different medical student year cohorts.
The practice is an active research ready practice and part of the Eastern Clinical Research Network, is an accredited Veterans friendly practice, and is a recognised provider practice for students from the Norwich University of the Arts.
The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities; diagnostic and screening procedures, maternity and midwifery services, treatment of disease, disorder or injury and surgical procedures.
The practice profile shows fewer patients in the age range 0-18 years than the local and national average. Life expectancy of patients was in line with local and national averages for men and women.
The practice profile also shows the practice to have a 59.2% of its patients with long-standing health conditions, compared with the local average of 53.9% and the national average of 51.4%.
The practice population is within the third national deprivation index level decile with one being the most deprived and ten being the least deprived practice populations.
Updated
6 April 2020
We carried out an inspection of Oak Street Medical Practice on 29 January 2019 due to the length of time since the last inspection. Following our review of the information available to us, including information provided by the practice, we focused our inspection on the following key questions:
- Are services at this location effective?
- Are services at this location responsive?
- Are services at this location well-led?
Because of the assurance received from our review of information we carried forward the ‘good’ ratings for the following key questions:
- Are services at this location safe?
- Are services at this location caring?
At the last inspection in December 2015 we rated the practice overall as providing an outstanding service. Specifically, we found the practice to be good for providing a safe, caring and effective service and outstanding for providing a responsive and well led service. It was also found to be providing good services across the patient population groups with responsive services for people whose circumstances may make them vulnerable and patients experiencing poor mental health (including people with dementia) were rated as outstanding.
At this inspection, we have rated the practice as good. We saw the practice was providing a responsive and well-led service and still demonstrated effective leadership, a clear vision and a patient focussed approach to care and treatment. However, we noted some improvement were required to ensure services were wholly effective for all population groups.
We based our judgement of the quality of care at this service is on a combination of:
- what we found when we inspected
- information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services and
- information from the provider, patients, the public and other organisations.
We have rated this practice as good overall.
We rated the population groups of people with long term conditions, working age people (including those recently retired and students), and peoples whose circumstances may make them vulnerable as requires improvement for providing effective services because:
- Prescribing rates for hypnotic medicines were significantly higher than local and national averages.
- The uptake rate for the national cervical cancer screening programme was below the 80% target rate.
- The practice had only undertaken 28% of annual reviews for those patients with a learning disability.
We rated the other population groups as good.
We rated the practice as outstanding for providing responsive services for people whose circumstances may make them vulnerable because:
- Services were tailored to meet the needs of individual patients. They were delivered in a flexible way that ensured choice and continuity of care.
- 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.
We rated the other population groups as good.
We rated the practice as good for providing well-led services because:
At this inspection, we saw the practice was providing a well-led service and still demonstrated effective leadership, a clear vision and a patient focussed approach to care and treatment. However, we noted some systems and processes in place had led to high levels of exception reporting, higher than average prescribing for hypnotics and low numbers of reviews completed for patients with a learning disability. The practice had some plans in place to address these areas. Therefore, we have rated the practice as good for providing well-led services.
Whilst we found no breaches of regulations, the provider should:
- Continue to monitor and improve prescribing rates for the prescribing of hypnotic medicines.
- Review the provision of the national cervical screening programme and improve uptake in line with the national target of 80%.
- Review the provision of immunisations for children and improve uptake in line with the world health organisation target of 95%.
- Review the provision of health checks for patients with learning disabilities with the aim of increasing uptake above the CCG target of 50%.
- Continue to monitor the systems and processes to ensure patients are reviewed and followed up appropriately.
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