Archived: Mrs Sarah Banham Also known as Rowley Healthcare

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Rowley Healthcare on 19 March 2015. Overall the practice is rated as requires improvement.

The overall rating for the practice is requires improvement. This is because the safe and well led domains were rated as requires improvement. We found the service was good for caring, effective and responsive domains. It was also rated as requires improvement for providing services for families, children and young people and those of working age, people with long term conditions, older people, people in vulnerable groups and people experiencing poor mental health.

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

• There were systems in place to ensure patients received a safe service although not all of the systems in place were robust.

• There was evidence of clinical audits, significant event analysis and best practice guidance in place to ensure patients’ care and treatment achieved positive outcomes.

• Patients were complimentary about the staff at the practice and said they were caring, listened and gave them sufficient time to discuss their concerns.

• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.

• The practice was responsive to the needs of the practice population and had a system in place for handling patient complaints and concerns.

• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from the Patient Participation Group (PPG).

• There were systems in place for assessing and monitoring the quality of service provision.

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns, and to report incidents and near misses. Information about safety was recorded although learning from this was not widely shared

• Urgent appointments were available on the day they were requested. However patients said that they sometimes had to wait a long time for non-urgent appointments and that it was very difficult to get through the practice when phoning to make an appointment. Some patients acknowledged that this had started to improve as a result of recent changes to the appointment system.

There were areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

The provider must:

• Ensure infection prevention and control audits and risk assessments of the practice are undertaken

• Ensure that the registered provider submits all statutory notifications related to any absence and relevant applications relating to any changes in registration

In addition the provider should:

• Review the current process to ensure information in relation to supervision and training is available for all staff

• Review the recruitment policy and procedure to ensure robust recruitment processes are consistently implemented to include all necessary employment checks for all staff

• Undertake a Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) audit.

• Address the gaps and inconsistencies in training so that staff have the knowledge and skills they need to deliver care safely and effectively such as chaperone duties and staff are aware of Mental Capacity Act (2005) and what this means in practice.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice