England’s Chief Inspector of General Practice has rated Lime Square Medical Centre, Manchester as Inadequate and placed the practice into special measures following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
Under CQC’s programme of inspections, all of England’s GP practices are given a rating in five key areas, are they; safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led.
Lime Square Medical Centre was rated as Requires Improvement for safe, caring, and responsive, and Inadequate for effective and well-led. The services provided by Lime Square Medical Centre have been rated as Inadequate overall.
Dr Janet Williamson, Deputy Chief Inspector of General Practice at CQC said:
“It’s unacceptable that people registered with Lime Square Medical Centre aren’t getting the high quality care which everyone is entitled to receive from their GP.
“We found there were no systems and processes in place to keep patients safe, for example there were no care plans for vulnerable patients and there were no clinical meetings in place either.
“We were also very concerned that Lime Square made little effort to monitor the effectiveness of its patient outcomes, and we saw no evidence that it was comparing its performance to others, either locally, or nationally.
“I do not believe that the practice is likely to resolve its challenges without external support. This is why we are placing the practice into special measures.”
A full report of this inspection has been published.
Some of the areas where CQC have told Lime Square Medical Centre they must improve are:
- They must make improvements to patient quality care planning. For example a more effective focus on hospital admissions and discharges, mental health, learning disability and palliative care patients.
- Ensure patients on high risk medications such as hypnotics are properly monitored and reviewed.
- Introduce a system to ensure all staff receive patient safety alerts and any action required is clearly identified and completed.
- Maintain and monitor the quality assurance processes for reporting, recording, acting on and monitoring of significant events.
- Review the management support to ensure new processes are embedded and monitored to ensure safety of patients and staff, and the smooth running of the practice.
- Identify carers and review the support the practice could provide to further support them.
- Develop a clear vision and practice plan to ensure good outcomes for patients.
The service will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action. Where necessary, another inspection will be conducted within a further six months, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to close the service by adopting our proposal to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.
Patients registered with the practices being placed into special measures should be aware that a package of support is offered by NHS England and the Royal College of GPs to ensure that there are no immediate risks to patient safety at these GP practices whilst improvements are being made.
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For further information please contact CQC Regional Communications Officer Kerri James on 07464 92 9966 or kerri.james@cqc.org.uk.
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