A surgery in the London borough of Enfield that had its registration suspended by the Care Quality Commission in 2016 was recently found to have made sufficient improvements to have its suspension lifted - although it continues to be rated Inadequate and will remain in special measures.
Boundary House Surgery in Hertford Road, Edmonton, was inspected in September 2016 and was suspended from providing services. Services continued to be provided at the location by a caretaker practice that was put in place by NHS England.
At the most recent inspection in March 2017 Boundary House was rated Inadequate for being effective and well-led. It was rated Requires Improvement for being safe and responsive, which was an improvement on the previous report. It was also rated Good for being caring.
A caretaker practice was put in place by NHS England to provide services to patients of the practice during a recent period of the suspension.
The practice, which cares for 5,200 people in the area, must now:-
- Ensure that all clinicians have a thorough knowledge and understanding of patient management and document management systems.
- Ensure that the practice’s quality improvement programme includes effective audit arrangements that drive improvement across key clinical outcomes. In addition the practice should continue to:-
- Continue with plans to change the leadership structure in an effort to improve the quality of service.
- Ensure all correspondence is acted upon without delay
- Continue to closely monitor systems used to refer patients to secondary care.
- Continue to reduce patient waiting times.
Professor Ursula Gallagher, CQC Deputy Chief Inspector of GP Practices, said:
“Although I acknowledge that this service has made a number of important improvements since it was suspended in September 2016, there are still a number of key concerns were sufficient evidence of improvement was not available. As a result the service will remain in special measures, be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action."
“Another inspection will be conducted within six months, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to take action in line with our enforcement procedures to begin the process of preventing the provider from operating the service. This will lead to cancelling their registration or to varying the terms of their registration within six months if they do not improve.”
You can read the full report on our website.
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