The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has found significant improvements at Wordsworth Health Centre, and upgraded their overall rating from inadequate to good. The surgery has also been removed from special measures, following an inspection in July and August.
This inspection was carried out to follow up improvements CQC told leaders to make following their previous inspection, when a warning notice was issued. At that time, inspectors found poor management of systems important to people’s safety and quality of care. This inspection found significant improvements addressing these concerns.
CQC has raised the practice’s overall rating from inadequate to good, as well as for safe and well-led. The ratings for effective and responsive have also been raised from requires improvement to good. This inspection didn’t assess how caring the service was, so this remains rated as good from a previous inspection.
Jane Ray, CQC deputy director of operations in London, said:
“When we inspected Wordsworth Health Centre, we were pleased to find leaders had made significant improvements to the service to keep people safe and ensure their needs were met. These included improvements to their systems for handling high risk medications, keeping people safe, and ensuring there were enough staff with suitable training to care for people safely.
“We also spoke to two people from the practice’s Patient Participation Group, who said they felt listened to when speaking to clinical staff and had enough time during consultations to make decisions about their care and treatment.
“Staff at the practice told us there was an open culture, where complaints and incidents were investigated and learnt from to improve people’s care in future. In the 2024 GP Patient Survey, people shared negative experiences of accessing the service. In response, leaders had implemented a new booking system, assigned more staff to phones at peak times, and arranged additional staff training leading to an increase of more than 1300 appointments in the month of January 2024 compared to April 2023.
“The practice also increased appointment lengths from 10 to 12 minutes. An in-house survey showed this, plus other initiatives, had increased people’s satisfaction accessing the service.
“All the leaders and staff at Wordsworth Health Centre should be proud of the improvements they’ve achieved so far. We’ve shared our findings with them so that they can continue to build on the improvements we saw, and we will continue to monitor the service to make sure these changes are sustained long term.”
Inspectors also found:
- People’s needs were well-assessed, treated, and reviewed. Where needed, the practice referred people to other services supporting their wellbeing
- Leaders showed a good understanding of the health and social care needs of the community they worked in. For example, the practice had reserved some appointments for older people who found it difficult to access online appointments and had recruited multilingual staff to better support people who don’t speak English as a first language
- Staff supported people who could not take part in traditional exercises with weekly chair-based exercise sessions, hosted at the practice. These sessions supported people to maintain a healthy lifestyle and were open to the local community
- The practice had worked with palliative care consultants to develop a tool to more quickly identify people in need of end-of-life care. This ensured their needs and preferences could be planned for earlier. The practice’s lead GP was awarded the 2024 GP of the Year by the Royal College of General Practitioners and Marie Curie Daffodil Standards for this work.
The report will be published on CQC’s website in the coming days.