Meon Health Practice

On this page

• Overview
• Assessing needs
• Delivering evidence-based care and treatment
• How staff, teams and services work together
• Supporting people to live healthier lives
• Monitoring and improving outcomes
• Consent to care and treatment

People’s needs were assessed and their wishes central to the care, support and treatment they received. Staff worked with people and partner services to coordination care and improve their experiences of services. Practices and systems were refined to improve patient outcomes.

This service scored 67 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

Staff told us how patients were asked when they registered with the practice and/or during consultations their preferred method of communication and if they require support. They considered peoples wider health, care and well being needs and worked with partners to support them to access appropriate services.

There were system and processes in place to assess, prioritise and review people’s care. Triage systems are in place with the reception and nursing team with escalation systems in place for people presenting with immediate needs. Where possible, staff tried to book people in advance. Patient records were accordingly flagged to alert staff to individuals needs and preferences. This enabled staff to identify vulnerable groups and proactively invite them for health checks, such as carers.

Staff received clinical supervision to ensure their decisions were reflective of national legislation, evidence-based good practice and required standards. Staff told us how they discussed changes to national best practice, informing their clinical practice and informing quality assurance audits.

There were established and effective systems in place to identify, share and embed best practice. Audits on administrative processes such as urgent suspected cancer referrals and clinical audits looking at safe prescribing were conducted regularly. Management meetings were held fortnightly to discuss the performance of staff and propose and introduce changes to the service.

We did not look at How staff, teams and services work together during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.

We did not look at Supporting people to live healthier lives during this assessment. The score for this quality statement is based on the previous rating for Effective.

Staff told us they routinely monitor people’s care, booking follow up consultations and requesting additional interventions such as blood tests to continuously improve their outcomes.

There were established and effective systems in place to identify and monitor people’s outcomes. This was achieved through formal quality outcome frameworks used by local commissioners of healthcare. Whilst others were audits chosen and conducted by the practice in response to health priorities or safe concerns to understand and improve clinical performance.

Outcomes for people were monitored both individually by clinicians providing their care and treatment and collectively through clinical audits. However, we found inconsistent practices had been employed in the monitoring of people with long term conditions contrary to best practice. These were raised with the practice, who reviewed peoples care during the period of assessment and responded to any risks identified.

Staff told us they received training in understanding and supporting people to make informed decisions. Consent was sought on separate occasions in accordance with best practice prior to some treatments to ensure patients had time to understand, consider and ask questions about the procedure.

The practice had established policies and procedures in place to ensure staff knew and observed best practice in recording and delivering care. They audited their consultations and interventions to ensure these were observed. We checked clinical records and saw staff had appropriately recorded patients consent in their records.