The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated The Old Dispensary in Wimborne, Dorset inadequate overall and has placed it in special measures.
The service has also been rated inadequate for being safe, effective and well-led. It was rated requires improvement for being responsive and good for being caring.
Following the inspection CQC imposed urgent conditions on the surgery. CQC did this to focus the service’s attention on where rapid improvements need to be made. This includes the practice providing CQC with an action plan to demonstrate how they will make sure all patients with long term or chronic conditions receive a monitoring review of their care and treatment as well as how they will improve oversight.
Neil Cox, CQC head of inspection, said:
“We had numerous concerns when we inspected The Old Dispensary which showed they weren’t providing safe care and treatment to people or monitoring them effectively.
“We also had concerns that patients particularly those with long term conditions or those being prescribed high risk medicines weren’t being safely monitored. This put them at risk of coming to harm. Patients also weren’t having the regular check-ups they needed to avoid their conditions from deteriorating.
“We imposed urgent conditions upon the service to ensure immediate improvements were implemented. The practice is also rated as inadequate and has been placed in special measures, which means we will reinspect to check that improvements have been made. If they have not, we will take further action to ensure patients receive safe and effective care.
“In the meantime, we are closely monitoring the service and liaising with our partner agencies to review the improvements that are being implemented.
Inspectors found the following issues at the practice:
- The practice did not have a clear and effective process for managing risks, issues and performance
- Patients with long-term conditions were not always offered a structured annual review to check their health and medicines needs were being met. While patient records may have indicated patients had been reviewed, not all those patients had been regularly invited for structured examinations
- Not all consent was documented in patients’ records. Staff said that consent to provide procedures was established at the time of any procedure but was not consistently recorded. The practice thought that participation in any procedure was implied consent
- Leaders in the practice could not consistently demonstrate that they had the capacity and skills to deliver high quality sustainable care
- The practice had a clear vision, but it was not supported by a credible strategy to provide high quality sustainable care
- The practice did not have a safe system to ensure that patients on high risk medicines were appropriately managed in a timely way.