Archived: Bolton Community Practice CIC Also known as Market Surgery Branch

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Bolton Community Practice (Market Surgery Chorley New Road Horwich) on 3 March 2016. Overall the practice is rated as Good.

Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents and near misses. All opportunities for learning from internal and external incidents were maximised.

• The importance given to safeguarding at the practice demonstrates that the practice team were regularly reviewing their safeguarding systems and were taking innovative action to make sustained improvements to those systems to maximise the protection of children and vulnerable adults.

• The practice used innovative and proactive methods to improve patient outcomes, working with other local providers to share best practice.

• Feedback from patients about their care was consistently and strongly positive.

• The practice worked closely with other organisations and with the local community in planning how services were provided to ensure that they meet patients’ needs.

• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and from the patient participation group.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs. Information about how to complain was available and easy to understand.
• The practice had an effective overarching governance framework that supported the delivery of the strategy and good quality care.
• The management team had strived for continuous improvement and staff are accountable for delivering change.
• The practice had a clear vision which had quality and safety as its top priority. The strategy to deliver this vision had been produced with stakeholders and was regularly reviewed and discussed with staff.

We saw one area of outstanding practice:

It was evident the practice clinical and managerial team had investigated and critically analysed the issues, identified lessons to be learnt and had discussed how improvements could be implemented with staff at the monthly clinical meetings. Importantly the practice had co-operated and shared information with local social and health agencies to ensure the individual patient’s safety issues were addressed and to disseminate the lessons learnt with practices in the wider Bolton area.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice