Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at St Paul’s Medical Centre on 30 March 2016. Overall the practice is rated as good.

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

• There was an open and transparent approach to safety.
• Staff assessed patients’ needs and delivered care in line with current evidence based guidance. Staff had the skills, knowledge and experience to deliver effective care and treatment.
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect 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.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.
• The practice had helped develop and subsequently piloted a new tool to identify children at risk of early neglect.
• The practice had attained the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) award in 2014 (This award rewarded practice teams who had improved their organisational quality of care to best practice recommended levels). The practice had also achieved a local sponsored Health at Work bronze award in 2015 (The Health at Work award recognised organisations and employers who offered a healthy working environment to their employees).
• 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.
• The provider was aware of and complied with the requirements of the Duty of Candour.

We saw one area of outstanding practice:

• Emergency medicines were divided into different smaller bags for use in different emergency circumstances. This gave staff more immediate access to the correct medicines to deal with a particular medical emergency in the practice.

The areas where the provider should make improvement are:

• Review the system for reporting and recording significant events to ensure that incidents are recorded by the staff member reporting the incident.
• Ensure that the practice chaperone protocol is fully embedded into the surgery’s procedures.
• Ensure systems are fully embedded into practice to guarantee that patient records are stored securely, maintaining confidentiality.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice

We reviewed the information available to us about St Paul's Medical Centre on 14 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.