Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at the Hetton Group Practice on 22 September 2015. Overall, the practice is rated as good.

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

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns, and report incidents and near misses;
• Risks to patients and staff 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 responsibilities;
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs. Information about how to complain was available and easy to understand;
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and were involved in decisions about their care and treatment;
• The majority of patients who provided us with feedback did not raise any concerns over access to appointments. Results from the National GP Patient Survey of the practice showed that patient satisfaction with access to appointments, practice opening hours and appointment waiting times, was broadly in line with local Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and national averages. Staff continuously monitored the practice's appointment system to provide better responsiveness for their patients;
• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt well-supported by the management team. Good governance arrangements were in place;
• Staff had a clear vision for the development of the practice and were committed to providing their patients with good quality care. This was demonstrated by the steps staff were taking to develop additional services to meet the needs of their patients.

However, there was an area of practice where the provider needs to make improvements. Importantly the provider should:

• The practice needs to assess and consider what emergency medications are appropriate for doctors to carry with them when carrying out routine home visits for use in acute situations.

We identified outstanding areas of practice:

• Staff had supported a local organisation (Sunderland People First) to carry out a check of how well their practice met the health needs of patients with learning disabilities. The practice had prepared an action plan to help address those areas where it had been identified that staff could make improvements. Staff had already taken action to implement their action plan and this had led to improvements in the services provided to patients with learning disabilities;

•  The practice offered a full range of immunisations for children who attended their child health and immunisation clinics. On the basis of the nationally reported data available to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), we saw that, where comparisons allowed, the delivery of the majority of childhood immunisations was mostly higher, when compared to the overall percentages for children receiving the same immunisations within the local CCG area.

Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP

Chief Inspector of General Practice

We reviewed the information available to us about Hetton Group Practice on 11 April 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.