Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Hindon Surgery on 9 August 2016.

Overall the practice is rated as outstanding.

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

• The practice worked closely with other organisations and with the local community in planning how services were provided to ensure that they met patients’ needs. For example, the practice was instrumental in establishing an Elderly Care Facilitator service in the locality. One of their roles was to send a birthday card and questionnaire to patients aged 75 and over on their birthday to help identify patients at increased risk.

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  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.

• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.

• The practice actively reviewed complaints and how they were managed and responded to, and made improvements as a result.

• The practice had strong and visible clinical and managerial leadership and governance arrangements.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• The practice had identified 131 patients as carers (6% of the practice list) and had been awarded a gold plus award for caring for carers by a local charity working in partnership with the local authority.

• The practice had an ethos of providing a one stop surgery to reduce patients’ visits to the surgery and to reduce the need for patients to visit hospital. They worked to remove all barriers and encourage service uptake.

  For example, following patient feedback and discussions with the Patients Participation Group the practice had introduced eight ‘never full’ surgeries per week. The practice was committed to offering same day access to a GP if this was what the patient wanted and this was confirmed by feedback from patients which was consistently highly positive. Data from the national GP patient survey showed patients rated the practice as the best performing practice in the local clinical commissioning group  area. For example, 100% of patients described the overall experience of this GP practice as good compared to the national average of 85%. This was supported by the latest data available from the Family and Friends test which showed that 100% of the patients responding to said they would recommend this practice to their friends and family.

     The areas where the provider should make improvement are:

• Ensure they adequately assess the risks inherent in the building, such as the security of consulting rooms.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice