Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Thorpe Surgery on 01 December 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good. Specifically, we found the practice was good for safe, effective, caring and responsive services, and outstanding for well-led, services. The effects of these ratings apply to everyone using the practice, including all the population groups.

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

• Staff knew how and where to raise concerns and report safety incidents and near misses. The practice used all opportunities to learn from internal and external incidents to improve service quality.

• The practice used excellent communication to work with other local healthcare providers to improve their patient outcomes.

• Feedback obtained from patients about their care was consistently and strongly positive in both the responsiveness and caring aspects of their care and treatment.

• 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.

• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from the patients in their patient participation group. For example access to practice services had been improved by extending opening hours and reviewing when appointments are available.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs. Information about how to complain was available in the practice, on their website and was easy to understand.
• The practice had a statement of purpose which had safe, effective, responsive care as its top priorities.

We saw an area of outstanding practice :

• The clinical leadership and management team were fully committed to a systematic approach to work with patients and local healthcare providers. The practice matron role was developed to create collaborative links with both social care and clinical care organisations. The practice matrons were responsible for implementing the practice approach to Avoiding Unplanned Admissions’ and visited patients identified as in need of frequent or recurrent care, whether this was in their own homes or residential care. The matrons communication weekly with; social services, district nurses, community matrons, palliative care, end of life teams, the practice GP care advisor and other community agencies was to share information and coordinate care for these identified patients. This information was documented and discussed weekly with the practice clinical team to ensure care and treatment was understood for these patients and the team could be proactive with their care to improve quality of life. When the practice population doubled after taking over another practices branch surgery they, recruited a salaried GP, increased their nursing staff and further developed the practice matron roles to take on certain previous GP responsibilities that would free-up their existing GPs to ensure patient care in their local area was not compromised.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice