- GP practice
Dr Azim and Partners
Report from 29 May 2024 assessment
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
Date of assessment: 15-22 August 2024. Remote clinical searches were carried out on 15 August 2024. A site visit took place on 22 August 2024. Dr Azim and Partners is situated at 67 Elliot Road, Hendon, London, NW4 3EB and provides NHS primary medical services in the London Borough of Barnet to approximately 8,824 patients through a General Medical Services (GMS) contract. The practice is registered with CQC to provide the regulated activities of diagnostic and screening procedures; treatment of disease, disorder or injury; and surgical procedures. The practice clinical staff include 7 GPs, 2 practice nurses, a healthcare assistant, a practice manager and a team of administration and reception staff. The practice is open from 8am to 6:30pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and from 8am to 8pm on Wednesday. The practice is closed on weekends. Patients have access to out of hours appointments from 6:30pm to 8pm, Monday to Friday and 8am to 8pm on weekends and bank holidays in Barnet, through several GP practices in the borough. Patients can contact the practice to request an appointment with this service. The practices uses an online requests system for patients, or patients can use the telephone or attend the practice in person to request an appointment. Information published by the UK Health Security Agency shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the third less deprived decile (7 out of 10). The lower the decile, the more deprived the practice population is relative to others. According the latest data available, the ethnic make-up of the practice area is 56.8% White, 18.8% Asian, 11.9% Other ethnic groups, 8.1% Black and 4.4% Mixed. We inspected and rated this service under our previous methodology on 16 November 2022 (published 16 February 2023). The overall rating was inadequate. The key questions for safe, effective and well-led were rated as inadequate and caring and responsive were rated as requires improvement. The service was placed into special measures. A number of areas for improvement were identified in relation to Regulation 12 HCSA (RA) Regulations 2014 Safe care and treatment, directing the practice to ensure that care and treatment was provided in a safe way for service users; and Regulation 17 HCSA (RA) Regulations 2014 Good governance, directing the practice to ensure that effective systems and processes were in place to ensure good governance in accordance with the fundamental standards of care. A follow up inspection was carried out on 4 May 2024 (published 1 June 2023) which was not rated. At this inspection, it was found that the practice had addressed the vast majority but not all of the concerns identified at the previous inspection. A requirement notice (now known as an action plan) highlighted that the practice was not always following national evidence-based guidance with regard to patients with acute exacerbation of asthma and in relation to the management of patients on Benzodiazepines or ‘Z’ medicines. We carried out this comprehensive inspection as part of our programme of reviewing providers who are currently rated as being in special measures in line with our current methodology. The clinical remote searches were completed by a GP Specialist Advisor on 15 August 2024 and a site visit was completed by a CQC inspector on 22 August 2024. We assessed all of the quality statements for safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. At this inspection, we found that most of the issues highlighted in the previous inspection had been addressed appropriately. However, we identified areas for improvement regarding the safe and appropriate management of medicines, including the management of patients prescribed Benzodiazepines and Z drugs, and good governance (explained in detail below). As a result of this inspection, we rated the practice as good in safe, effective, caring and well-led. We rated the practice as requires improvement for providing responsive services. This gave the practice a new overall rating of good. We also issued a notice of action plan for breach of Regulation 17 Good Governance. An action plan notice gives the practice an opportunity to address the concerns identified by a specified date, after which we will carry out a further assessment to review whether appropriate action has been taken. I am taking this service out of special measures. This recognises the significant improvements that have been made to the quality of care provided by this service.
People's experience of this service
We collected patient feedback from a variety of sources, including the GP national patient survey, feedback received by us from patients about the service and we had access to the practice’s own patient survey and the data collected by the Friends and Family Test. The GP patient survey results fell below, sometimes well below, the local GP average and national average scores regarding patient satisfaction with the service. This included the levels of access they were given to obtaining care where required. We reviewed the surveys conducted by the practice and the Friends and Family Test feedback, which were carried out under a different methodology to the GP National Patient Survey. We saw that feedback was predominantly positive in these surveys.The practice did not currently have an active patient participation group (PPG) as it had found it challenging to recruit members, however, the practice was exploring using patient champions as an alternative.