Archived: Woodville Surgery

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Woodville Surgery on 20 May 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good.

Specifically, we found the practice to be good for providing safe, effective, responsive, caring and well led services. It was good for providing services for older people, people with long term conditions, families, children and babies, working age people (including those recently retired) and people experiencing poor mental health (including people with dementia) and required improvement for people whose circumstances may make them vulnerable.

Our key findings were as follows:

• Systems were in place for the learning and improvement from safety incidents. Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents. Learning from incidents was shared internally and externally.
• Risks to patients were assessed and well managed.
• A multi-disciplinary approach to patient care was evident; the practice worked well with other agencies to ensure care and support was coordinated.
• Patients’ needs were generally assessed and care was planned and delivered following best practice guidance. Staff had received training appropriate to their roles and any further training needs had been identified and planned.
• Annual health checks had not been undertaken for patients with a learning disability in the last 12 months, however, the majority of these patients had been seen by a doctor in this time.
• Feedback we received from patients during the inspection, and through comment cards, was overwhelmingly positive. Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
• Information about how to make a complaint was available and easy to understand. Complaints were dealt with appropriately and in a timely manner.
• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt supported by management. The practice proactively sought feedback from staff and patients, which it acted on.

We saw an area of outstanding practice:

• The practice employed a pharmacist on a contract basis to provide a consultation and advice service. The pharmacist’s role involved carrying out medicines audits, reviews of patients’ medicines, and checks on patients to determine whether they had had any negative side effects from medicines or from being prescribed several medicines. The pharmacist sent out a monthly newsletter updating all clinicians on any changes to medicines guidelines or medicines alerts which highlighted any actions which were necessary to ensure patients received appropriate treatment. The pharmacist also did a patient search and identify affected patients to ensure action was taken as needed.

However, there were also areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

The provider should:

• Strengthen systems to assess and demonstrate the competence of healthcare assistants for specific tasks.
• Ensure routine checks undertaken on equipment are documented.
• Review policies and procedures to ensure these are robust, for example ensuring recruitment policy includes pre-employment checks required by legislation.
• Ensure governance systems are strengthened to include more detailed recording of meetings and information disseminated.
• Ensure staff have had appropriate training to undertake annual health checks for patients with a learning disability and undertake these checks as soon as possible

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice