England’s Chief Inspector of General Practice has told a Swinton GP practice that it must improve. Care Quality Commission inspectors visited The Lakes Medical Practice in January.
Inspectors have rated the practice as inadequate for safety and well-led, requires improvement for effectiveness and responsiveness and good for caring. Overall the practice has been rated as inadequate.
A full report of the inspection can be found on our website.
The report highlights a number of areas of concern including:
The practice did not have a system in place to deal with patient safety and medicine alerts. Inspectors also found that there was a lack of record keeping within the practice; meetings were not always documented and safety checks were not recorded.
Recruitment checks were not always carried out on staff, and staff files did not always contain the relevant information. In addition, with regard to patient appointments, patients told CQC they did not find the appointment system easy to use and sometimes struggled getting an appointment.
Beverley Cole, Head of General Practice for the North, said:
“It was worrying that we found that recent medicine alerts had not been acted on and when we asked the practice to perform a search on a recent drug alert, we found four patients on this drug had not been recalled to discuss the alert. This potentially put patients at risk."
“We some saw evidence of meetings taking place, however they were not frequent; the last team meeting was held in October 2017. We found that significant events that happened after this time that had not been discussed."
Clinical meetings were happening regularly but these were not minuted. Therefore it was difficult to identify what had taken place and what learning had been shared."
“The practice told us that they were committed to the needs of their service users and would involve them in decision making about their treatment and care. However, on the day of the inspection we found a lack of strategy in the overall management of the service. The practice was unable to demonstrate an effective strategy in respect of managing safety."
“It is important that the people who are registered with The Lakes Medical Practice can rely on getting high quality care. The service has been placed in special measures and will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to close the service.”
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The practice was unable to demonstrate an effective strategy in respect of managing safety
Beverley Cole, Head of General Practice for the North