Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Spring Hall Medical Centre on 3 March 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good.

Specifically we rated the practice as good for providing safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led services. It was also good for providing services for all the population groups

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

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns, to report incidents and near misses. Information about safety was recorded.
• 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
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in care and decisions about their treatment
• Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand.
• Urgent appointments were usually available on the day they were requested
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs
• There was good medicines management overall
• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt supported by management

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice

This practice is rated as Good overall. The practice was previously inspected on 3 March 2015. On that occasion the practice received a rating of Good overall.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? - Good

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Spring Hall Group Practice 21 June 2018 as part of our inspection programme.

At this inspection we found:

• The practice had clear systems to manage risk so that safety incidents were less likely to happen. When incidents did happen, the practice learned from them and updated or improved their processes.
• There were clear governance policies and protocols which were accessible to all staff.
• The practice had responded to patient feedback in relation to access to appointments. As a result, duty doctors were assigned each day to triage requests and offer same day appointments when required.
• The practice undertook quality improvement activity to review and improve the effectiveness and appropriateness of care provided. Care and treatment was delivered in line with current evidence based guidance.
• The practice took part in local initiatives to improve patient experience. They were part of the newly formed ‘Calderdale Group Practice’ which incorporated 11 local practices who shared some ‘back office’ functions to improve resilience.
• The practice had a significant number of patients resident in nursing homes for older people. They provided a monthly ‘ward round’ to monitor the health and well-being of this group of patients.
• We observed staff interacting with patients in a caring and good-humoured way.
• Staff told us the leadership team was supportive and approachable.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are :

• Maintain monitoring processes to ensure that all medicines are checked regularly and out of date medicines are replaced in a timely manner.
• Improve patients’ experience of making a complaint by including Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman details on all correspondence to patients, including email.

Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGPChief Inspector of General Practice