Archived: Coastal Healthcare - Morecambe Same Day Health Centre

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice.

We inspected Coastal Health Care Morecambe Same Day Health Centre on 15th October 2014. We carried out a comprehensive inspection of this service under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

We inspected this service as part of our new comprehensive inspection programme. This provider had not been inspected before and that was why we included them.

We rated the service as Good across all five domains.

Our key findings were as follows:

• Access to the service was effective and appropriate.
• There was a clear management structure to support and guide staff to deliver safe, responsive and effective care to patients.
• Patients told us they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in care and treatment decisions
• The practice was clean and well maintained.

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

The provider should:

• Ensure there is a process in place with the wider health economy for example other GP practices to secure appropriate access to summary care records.
• Ensure there is a formal governance arrangement in place to allow staff to follow patients through pathways.
• Ensure there is an auditable system for reviewing and monitoring the recording of serial numbers on blank prescription pads held in storage and once allocated to GPs.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice