Archived: Minehead Medical Centre Also known as Harley House

On this page

• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

We rated the practice as requires improvement for providing caring services because: The percentage of respondents to the national GP patient survey who responded positively to the overall experience of their GP practice, was lower when compared to the national average. We observed negative interactions between practice staff and patients as well as medical professionals from other local services.

This service scored 10 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The practice did not have effective processes to ensure patients were always given appropriate and timely information to cope with their care, treatment or condition. Triage processes meant that patients did not always receive advice from a medical professional. When practice appointments had reached capacity and patients were directed to use alternative local services, this was not always done in consultation with a healthcare professional to ensure they received appropriate information. During inspection we observed that clinicians did not always treat colleagues from other organisations with kindness and respect when they were involved in the care and treatment of registered patients. We saw positive interactions between staff and patients.

The practice was able to register patients with no fixed residence. Staff told us a social prescriber employed by the primary care network, worked from the practice one day a week and was able to direct patients to local support networks as necessary.

We did not look at Independence, choice and control during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Caring.

The percentage of respondents to the GP patient survey who responded positively to the overall experience of their GP practice was 50% compared to the national average of 71%.

Due to the backlog in documents and patient notes summarising and the challenges with appointment availability, staff and leaders were unable to give assurances that they would be able to consistently respond to patients' immediate needs.

The practice did not operate necessary processes to ensure staff received appropriate support to conduct their role. Staff we spoke with told us staffing resources were often redirected from necessary administrative tasks such as clinical document workflow, to alleviate staffing shortages in other areas such as reception. This meant there wasn't the necessary resource available to address practice backlogs. At the time of inspection, an action plan had not been identified to address staffing shortages.