Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Cheadle Medical Practice on 30 June 2016. Overall the practice is rated as good.

Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:

• The practice had a clear vision which had quality and safety as its top priority. The strategy to deliver this vision had been produced with staff and stakeholders and was regularly reviewed and discussed with staff.
• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents and near misses. All opportunities for learning from internal and external incidents were maximised.
• Staff assessed patients’ needs and delivered care in line with current evidence based guidance. Staff had the skills, knowledge and experience to deliver effective care and treatment. The practice had a strong commitment to supporting staff training and development.
• Feedback from patients about their care was consistently and strongly positive. Patients described the GPs and staff as caring and professional.
• Patients were complimentary about the quality of service they received but some said that they found it difficult getting through to the practice by telephone. The practice was aware of this, and had been in consultation with the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) for a lengthy period of time. The practice had received confirmation that in September 2016 that a new call routing telephone system was going to be installed.
• The practice worked closely with other organisations and with the local community in planning how services were provided to ensure they met people’s needs.
• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and from the patient participation group. For example the practice had reviewed it patient appointment access and adapted their appointment system to improve access.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.
• The practice actively reviewed complaints and how they are managed and responded to, and made improvements as a result.
• The practice had strong and visible clinical and managerial leadership and governance arrangements.
• Staff assessed patients’ needs and delivered care in line with current evidence based guidance.

We saw some areas of outstanding practice:

• A comprehensive spreadsheet tracking all patients designated at risk or with a safeguarding protection plan in place was maintained. This provided the safeguarding lead with quick access to the patients’ past history and assisted monitoring of patients attending emergency departments.
• One GP had developed an easy read protocol for clinicians to follow should there be suspicion of infection or questions around the Zika virus. This had been shared and adopted by the CCG, the local public health team and by Public Health England in Manchester. The GP had also developed templates for use with the patient clinical record system which had also been shared by the CCG with other practices. These included the child immunisation, cardiovascular and flu.
• The practice was active in using national media to raise awareness about different health campaigns. For example the GP practice had recently featured on the local news programme Northwest Tonight to promote the uptake of the flu vaccine for adults and children. This had resulted in an increase uptake of the flu vaccine.
• The GP who was also the clinical lead for the CCG was actively involved and promoted (through online videos) Stockport Together, an initiative working with the local council, GP practices, NHS hospitals for acute medicine and mental health and the voluntary sector to look at ways to bring together health and social care services to provide a more responsive service to patients and people living in Stockport.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice

We reviewed the information available to us about Cheadle Medical Practice on 16 May 2019. We did not find evidence of significant changes to the quality of service being provided since the last inspection. As a result, we decided not to inspect the surgery at this time. We will continue to monitor this information about this service throughout the year and may inspect the surgery when we see evidence of potential changes.