Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Lyngford Park Surgery on 27 May 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good.

Specifically, we found the practice to be good for providing safe, well-led, effective, caring and responsive services. It was also good for providing services for older patients, patients with long term conditions, families, children and young people, working age people (including those recently retired and students), people whose circumstances may make them vulnerable and people experiencing poor mental health (including people with dementia).

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

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns, and to report incidents and near misses. Information about safety was recorded, monitored, appropriately reviewed and addressed.
• Risks to patients were assessed and well managed.
• Patients’ needs were assessed and care was planned and delivered following best practice guidance. Staff had received training appropriate to their roles and any further training needs had been identified and planned.
• Health promotion and prevention was a priority for the practice.
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect by all staff and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
• Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand.
• Patients said they found it easy to make an appointment with a named GP and that there was continuity of care, with urgent and triage appointments available the same day.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.
• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt supported by management. The practice proactively sought feedback from staff and patients, which it acted on.

We saw areas of outstanding practice:

• We saw evidence of the practice providing health promotion in the community. For example, the registered manager partner provided a “When things go wrong below the belt” talk to approximately 30 men about testicular cancer, erectile dysfunction and prostate problems. Practice staff attended a local ‘Fun Day’ and ‘pamper’ evening and provided blood pressure checks and blood oxygen saturation checks using pulse oximeters to people attending the events. The GPs also provide brief medical articles for parish magazines in support of health promotion; recent articles included information about; hay fever; chronic pain and seasonal diabetes advice.
• The practice had implemented a “Year of Care” approach for diabetic patients. Patients are given test results in advance of their appointment with the lead diabetic nurse which gave them time to think about their progress before their care planning appointment and enabled them to be more involved in their care and treatment.

However there were areas of practice where the provider could make improvements.

Importantly the provider should;

• Ensure all staff are clear about when to obtain written consent and how to record it.
• Review systems for recording training to ensure all staff records are up to date.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice

We reviewed the information available to us about Dr Sells, Dr Edwards, Dr Shackleton on 30 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.