Herrington Medical Centre

We carried out an inspection of this service on 7 February 2020 following our annual review of the information available to us including information provided by the practice. Our review indicated that there may have been a significant change to the quality of care provided since the last inspection.

This inspection focused on the following key questions: effective, caring, responsive, and well led.

Because of the assurance received from our review of information we carried forward the ratings for the following key questions: safe.

We based our judgement of the quality of care at this service is on a combination of:

• what we found when we inspected;
• information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services and;
• information from the provider, patients, the public and other organisations.

We have rated this practice as outstanding overall.

We rated the practice as outstanding for providing caring services because:

• People were truly respected and valued as individuals and were empowered as partners in their care. Staff were fully committed to working in partnership with people and making this a reality for each person.

We rated the practice as outstanding for providing responsive services because:

• Services were tailored to meet the needs of individual people and were delivered in a way to ensure flexibility, choice and continuity of care. There were innovative approaches to providing integrated person-centred care that involved other services.

We rated the practice as outstanding for providing well led services because:

• The leadership, governance and culture were used to drive and improve the delivery of high-quality care. Safe innovation was celebrated. There was a clear approach to seeking out and embedding new ways of providing care and treatment.

We also rated the practice as good for providing effective services because:

• Patients received effective care and treatment that met their needs.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• A GP at the practice had developed a website specifically designed to help patients to be involved as much as possible in their care. The website began as a teaching tool but had been developed to help patients with certain long-term conditions to make informed decisions about their treatment. The site had been used almost 500 times by patients between August 2019 and at the time of the inspection, and feedback from patients showed they found it useful. A patient we spoke to on the day of inspection told us they had used the website and that it helped them to better understand their care options and made them feel less anxious about their condition.
• A practice nurse was the lead nurse for the local clinical commissioning group (CCG), and in this role they had implemented the “No Fear” campaign in the local area to promote uptake of cervical screening among younger women who were apprehensive about attending for their first smear test. The nurse had worked with local hair salons and beauty parlours to encourage them to offer discounts to women who attended their practice for cervical screening for the first time. The practice’s cervical screening rate among 25- to 28-year-olds since starting this project was 77% and the practice’s overall screening rate had increased from 80% in 2016/17 to 82% in 2018/19. Uptake was also high across the other five practices in the Primary Care Network where the scheme was being introduced.

We also saw an area where the practice should improve:

• Thoroughly investigate the reason why the exception reporting rate is high for patients with diabetes, on the register, in whom the last IFCC-HbA1c is 64 mmol/mol or less in the preceding 12 months, and take action to reduce this.

Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care