- GP practice
Mayflower Medical Centre
Report from 20 March 2024 assessment
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Mayflower Medical Centre is an NHS GP practice which provides primary care services to patients in Harwich. We carried out an announced assessment of one quality statement, equity of access, under the key question on 27 March 2024. We carried out the assessment as part of our work to understand how practices are working to try to meet peoples demands for access and to better understand the experiences of people who use services and providers. We recognise the work that GP practices have been engaged in to continue to provide safe, quality care to the people they serve. We know staff are carrying this out whilst the demand for general practice remains exceptionally high, with more appointments being provided than ever. However, in this challenging context, access to general practice remains a concern for people. Our strategy makes a commitment to deliver regulation driven by people’s needs and experiences of care. The assessment of the quality statement equity of access includes looking at what practices are doing innovatively to improve patient access to primary care and sharing this information to drive improvement. We found that the Provider understood the challenges to patient access and used feedback and other information to monitor and improve access. Overall, the practice is rated as good and the key question responsive continues to be rated as providing a good service. The provider had an effective system to monitor access to appointments and telephone lines for the purpose of continuous improvement. The practice Patient Participation Group (PPG) was actively involved and told us that the provider implemented improvements in response to feedback.
People's experience of this service
According to the National GP Patient Survey results the practice had continued to perform below national ‘access’ averages for all key indicators. Between 2021 and 2022 patient satisfaction was on a downward trend. Feedback on the NHS.uk website showed that patients continue to experience difficulty with securing an appointment and with getting through to the practice by telephone. However, we saw evidence that the provider had implemented measures to improve access. Although performance according to the national survey remain below average, since 2022 patient satisfaction has been steadily increasing for all key indicators. The Friends and Family Test results for January 2024 indicate that 89% of patients were satisfied with the practice.