Willesborough Health Centre

Updated 6 February 2023

Willesborough Health Centre is the main site for Ashford Medical Partnership.

The practice has two branch surgeries located at:

St Stephens Health Centre, St Stephen’s Walk, Ashford, Kent TN23 5AQ

Singleton Health Centre, 10 Singleton Hill, Ashford, Kent TN23 5GR

Out of hours services are provided by another provider Integrated Care 24 Ltd (IC24) through the 111 service. They deliver services to patients when the practice is closed.

The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities; diagnostic and screening procedures, family planning, maternity and midwifery services, treatment of disease, disorder or injury and surgical procedures. These are delivered across all 3 of their sites; Willesborough Health Centre, St Stephens Health Centre and Singleton Health Centre.

The practice is situated within the Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board (ICB) and delivers General Medical Services (GMS) to a patient population of about 34,700. This is part of a contract held with NHS England.

Ashford Medical Partnership also run the Ashford Medical Practice Primary Care Network which provides additional services and support to the local population.

Information published by Public Health England report deprivation within the practice population group as fifth on a scale of one to ten. Level one represents the highest levels of deprivation and level ten the lowest.

Data from 31 March 2022 shows that the practice reported a higher prevalence in their practice population of several conditions compared to local and England averages. This included amongst others, depression, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, asthma and obesity.

Accident and emergency attendance for the year ending 31 December 2021 was lower than the local average, but higher than the average attendance for England.

There is a team of 6 GP partners, 7 salaried GPs and 3 long term locum GPs who provide care at the 3 locations. There were also 4 GP registrars (qualified doctors undergoing specialist general practice training). The practice clinical team also includes three advanced clinical practitioners, 3 trainee advanced clinical practitioners (including a paramedic), 8 practice nurses, one associate practitioner, one nursing associate, 4 healthcare assistants and 2 trainee nursing associates.

The clinical team are supported by a team of reception/administration staff. Each site has a site manager, and these are overseen by a general manager. The general manager is supported by a business support officer, both are based at Willesborough Health Centre. Additionally, the practice has a quality team consisting of 2 patient support officers, an IT and communications co-ordinator. There is also a prescribing team (6 members), medical secretary team (6 members), workflow and summarising team (6 members), business support team (4 members) and reception team (21 members).

Additional support staff employed by the primary care network (PCN) and run by Ashford Medical Partnership includes a clinical pharmacist and pharmacy technician, a physician’s associate, 2 care co-ordinators, 2 first contact physiotherapists, 2 care navigators and a health and wellbeing coach.

Extended access is provided by the practice outside normal surgery hours which includes evening and Saturday appointments. There is also an improved access service that patients of the practice can book appointments with provided by another provider.

Updated 6 February 2023

At our last inspection of Willesborough Health Centre on 30 November and 01 December 2021, we found the ratings to be Requires Improvement overall and in safe, effective and well-led. The ratings were Good for the caring and responsive domains.

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Willesborough Health Centre on 8 and 19 December 2022. Overall, the practice is rated as Good.

Safe – Good

Effective - Good

Caring - Good

Responsive – Requires Improvement

Well-led -Good

The full reports for previous inspections can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Willesborough Health Centre on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

Why we carried out this inspection

We conducted a comprehensive inspection to confirm that the practice had taken action to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breaches in regulations that we identified in our previous inspection in December 2021.

How we carried out the inspection

This inspection was carried out in a way which enabled us to spend a minimum amount of time on site.

This included:

• Conducting staff interviews using video conferencing.
• Completing clinical searches on the practice’s patient records system (this was with consent from the provider and in line with all data protection and information governance requirements).
• Reviewing patient records to identify issues and clarify actions taken by the provider.
• Requesting evidence from the provider.
• A short site visit.

Our findings

We based our judgement of the quality of care at this service 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.

We found that:

• The practice provided care in a way that kept patients safe and protected them from avoidable harm.
• Patients received effective care and treatment that met their needs.
• Staff dealt with patients with kindness and respect.
• The practice were responsive to patients’ needs.
• There was significant patient concern about access to the service.
• Although the practice was making significant efforts to improve and mitigate barriers to accessing their services, people could not always access the service.
• The way the practice was led and managed promoted the delivery of high-quality, person-centre care.

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

• Ensure that they continue with and complete their action plan to ensure all fire risks and legionella testing are addressed appropriately.
• Ensure that they continue with the action plan to add additional searches of patients on benzodiazepines, Z drugs and gabapentinoids, so that all who may require a review, receive one.
• Ensure that they continue to capture, monitor, analyse and act on, patient feedback including the National GP Patient Survey and continue with plans to improve communication with patients, for example with respect to telephone and general access to the service.
• Continue with the plan to move complaints on to the intranet and further widen the scope for disseminating learning.
• Continue to work on improving childhood immunisation and cervical screening uptake and the use of antibiotics in relation to simple urinary tract infections.

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

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Hospitals and Interim Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services