The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated the Meanwhile Garden Medical Centre in Kensington and Chelsea, West London as Inadequate and has placed the surgery into special measures following an inspection in July 2015.
During a recent inspection, CQC found the provider was failing to provide care which was safe, effective, caring, well-led and responsive to people’s needs. Placement into special measures means that the practice must now make necessary improvements or face action that could result in closure.
Under CQC’s new programme of inspections, all primary medical services in England are being given a rating according to whether they are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led.
A full report from the inspection has been published on this website.
CQC found that the practice did not prioritise safety and utilise information from reported incidents, national patient safety alerts and complaints from patients to identify risks and improve patient safety. There were no clear systems in place for the reporting of significant events, incidents and near misses, and the significant event procedure had not been reviewed since 2011.
Infection control standards were not monitored, cleaning schedules were not in place and practice staff had not received infection control training. In addition, Flu vaccines were not always stored appropriately and posed significant threat to patient safety.
Staff had not received training in fire safety, safeguarding adults and chaperoning and evidence of staff qualifications and competency relating to their specific role were in some cases absent.
Criminal record checks had not been completed on all staff including the nurse, GP link worker, a locum GP and reception staff who carried out chaperoning duties.
Ursula Gallagher, Deputy Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services, said:
“It is essential that the Meanwhile Garden Medical Centre takes action to address the issues we identified during the last inspection.
“We were concerned to find that staff were not always clear about what constituted an incident, action was not always taken to prevent the recurrence of serious incidents and where action was taken it was not always immediate.
“We were also concerned that staff had not received fire safety and safeguarding training and that adequate criminal, skills and competency checks had not always been carried out when new staff were recruited.
"When we are faced with a practice that is failing to care for patients properly, our first instinct is to work with the provider to ensure that the service improves.
“We will re-inspect the surgery within six months to check whether sufficient improvements have been made. If sufficient improvements have not been made and there remains a rating of inadequate for any key question or overall, we will take further action which may include closure.”
Ends
For further information please contact Yetunde Akintewe, CQC Regional Engagement Manager, on 07471 020 659. For media enquiries, call the press office on 020 7448 9401 during office hours. Journalists wishing to speak to the press office outside of office hours can find out how to contact the team here http://www.cqc.org.uk/media/our-media-office. For general enquiries, please call 03000 61 61 61
Find out more
Read our reports on Meanwhile Garden Medical Centre.