Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Dr MA Sims' Practice on 22 June 2016 also known as Dr Sims and Partners. Overall the practice is rated as good.

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

• Staff knew and were confident reporting significant events. These were investigated, responded to and lessons learnt identified. Staff were provided with training and support where appropriate.
• Patient safety and medicines alerts had been appropriately reviewed and actioned. However, they would benefit from revisiting the searches to ensure good safe prescribing practices are embedded within their practice team.
• Staff understood and were confident in safeguarding children and vulnerable adults. The practice had a large number of children known to social services and all children who failed to attend hospital appointments were contacted.
• The premises were found to be clean and tidy and staff had undertaken training in infection control.
• Medicines were managed safely and regular checks were conducted to improve prescribing behaviour.
• Newly appointed staff had received appropriate recruitment check prior to being appointed.
• The practice demonstrated adherence to relevant and current evidence based guidance and standards, including National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) best practice guidelines.
• The practice had achieved 99.6% of the total number of QOF points available.
• The practice did not conduct multidisciplinary meetings but communicated with partner services tasking one another through the patient record system.
• The practice promoted national screening programmes and had higher than the national average for their patient’s uptake of cervical screenings.
• Data from the national GP patient survey showed patients rated the practice similar to the local and national averages for several aspects of care.
• Staff treated patients with kindness and respect.
• The practice provided a range of face to face, telephone and online consultations with GPs, practice nurses and healthcare assistants.
• Patients were happy with the practice opening hours, but experienced difficulties getting through on the phones.
• Complaints were appropriately recorded, investigated and responded to. Lessons were learnt, apologises made and staff had received training to improve standards of care.
• The partners regarded it as a privilege to be a GP and care for their patients. They met monthly to discuss practice performance and plans for the future of the service.
• There was an overarching governance framework supporting the delivery of services. Staff had appointed roles and responsibilities and covered for colleagues during planned and unplanned absence.
• The practice were active within their Clinical Commissioning Group and participated in national thematic research and local audits to inform the delivery of services.

The areas where the provider should make improvement are:

• Ensure regular medicine searches are conducted to ensure good safe prescribing practices are embedded within the practice prescribing team.
• Ensure palliative care patients receive regular reviews, utilising template data and reference to the Gold Standard Framework.
• Ensure meetings are minuted. Where actions are assigned these are clearly documented in the meeting minutes. They should also include completion or review dates and be revisited at subsequent meetings to ensure actions are progressed and finalised.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice